Unix conf file format

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Asked 10 years, 9 months ago. Active 11 months ago. Viewed 11k times. There are a lot of libraries or existing functions that you can reuse to read and parse those files. But feel free to invent your own format or use XML Add a comment. Change Language. Related Articles. Table of Contents. Improve Article.

Save Article. Like Article. Next The Linux Kernel. Recommended Articles. Article Contributed By :. Easy Normal Medium Hard Expert. Writing code in comment? Please use ide. Recently, such as in systemd documentation, these files are sometimes called "drop-in" files. Two significant situations are driving this movement:. Let's look at the logrotate utility. It is not very complicated, but each file to be rotated needs to be specified.

Each file may also need different configuration options. Instead of editing this single file each time an application is added or updated on the system, we separate the configuration for each application to a specific file. The main configuration file includes all files in another directory.

Files in the directory may originate from different RPM packages. The owner of each package knows what needs to be rotated and how frequently. They provide a configuration file specific to their application and add it to logrotate. It is also removed from logrotate. Other examples of this use case are scheduling with cron in the cron. By using separate files, the system administrator does not need to manage conflicting writes to a single file.

The Apache web server is an extensive program with many configuration options. Apache utilizes a conf. When I started with Apache, it was common to have a single server host multiple virtual sites. Each of those virtual hosts had its own configuration file. This approach allowed us to share the administration duties of the files as well as share the files on different systems during migration, recovery, and load balancing.

Today, I see more cases where the configuration is separated by function. The ssl. Other modules may also drop files into the conf. It is up to the web administrator to create or manage the production files.

Free online course: Red Hat Enterprise Linux technical overview. During system boot, the scripts read this file and use "sysctl" to set the parameters shown in the file. Changing the file has no effect before the next reboot. How To Wiki Explore. Find a How to. Make a How to. Page Lists.