I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
(Windows) Resource Monitor, disk tab, tick the process, see what files it opens and closes.
Also the usual %programdata% and the two %appdata% find most things.
Do things stay in that list when they are not used (since they would be opened and closed in far less than a second)? If so that’s pretty cool.
If not, you can use Process Monitor to check this. That’s what I usually do.
The *nix equivalent is the
lsof
command. This doesn’t help you finding out in which hierarchy config files are parsed when the program accesses multiple ones, which is often the case.Unless it’s using the Registry for some config values.
True. That’s harder to track down.
Procmon if you’re a masochist, or do a before and after snapshot. Here’s one tool for the latter: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/registry_changes_view.html