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.
You still don’t know which location is preffered and how get they get merged. In my experience, digging into the source is the most straighforward. But my usual problem is more that the config option doesn’t do at all what the documentation says it does.
Wouldn’t the strace.out file be in chronological order?
Yes, though if two different files allow for the same config key - you’re stuck opening both to check
And you still couldn’t be sure, could be parsed the other way around for historic reasons.
Just reading the source code (if possible ofc) is imho easier than reading.
True, though I had to use strace method on closed source binaries before (zoom)