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As far as I know, the Dconf configuration is stored in ~/.config/dconf/user. However, I just noticed that I also have ~/.config/user which has not been used for a while:

~> ls -l ~/.config/user ~/.config/dconf/user
-rw-rw-r-- 1 andrea andrea 56059 may 14 17:41 /home/andrea/.config/dconf/user
-rw-rw-r-- 1 andrea andrea 51750 jan 29 23:36 /home/andrea/.config/user

They are both GVariant databases:

~> file ~/.config/user ~/.config/dconf/user
/home/andrea/.config/user:       GVariant Database file, version 0
/home/andrea/.config/dconf/user: GVariant Database file, version 0

What is ~/.config/user? Is it maybe an old version of ~/.config/dconf/user that was migrated to a different path in a recent version of Ubuntu? Or is it something different?

Can I safely delete it?

Andrea Lazzarotto
  • 7,956
  • How it got in ~/.config who knows but has no value so you can delete it – doug May 14 '16 at 16:40
  • Well, you can always do strings /home/andrea/.config/user or hexdump -C /home/andrea/.config/user to see what's inside that file – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy May 14 '16 at 19:01
  • @Serg, sure... I could use any of the standard forensics trick. But the question is not about what is inside the file (I know it's a GVariant db file, quite similar to the other one). My question could be re-stated as: does my Ubuntu make use of it? Did any previous version of Ubuntu make use of it? – Andrea Lazzarotto May 14 '16 at 19:27

1 Answers1

3

I ended up deleting the file and nothing seems to have broken.

~/.config/user is not a standard Ubuntu configuration file.

The most plausible cause for its existence is that I wanted to make a backup copy of ~/.config/dconf/user and then I forgot about it.

Andrea Lazzarotto
  • 7,956