Question

Is there any cross platform way to find out which dir should be my applications configuration?

For example, Mozilla Firefox uses /home/user/.mozilla on linux, and %APPDATA%\Mozilla on Windows.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox#Navigating_to_the_profile_folder

Is there any lib that deals with it, or is it just lots of #ifdef?

Answer 1

Mozilla is an old app and has kept its configuration in $HOME/.mozilla for quite some time. New apps, however, are encouraged to instead store configuration files in $HOME/.config/myappname.

I would assume most of the generic cross platform libraries have a way of getting the base configuration directory (usually $HOME/.config/ on Linux and %APPDATA on Windows). GLib, for example, has g_get_user_config_dir() , and all you need to do is append your app name to the result (untested code):

gchar *
myapp_get_config_dir ()
{
    const gchar *user_config_dir;
    gchar *my_config_dir;

    user_config_dir = g_get_user_config_dir ();
    my_config_dir = g_build_filename (user_config_dir, "myappname", NULL);

    return my_config_dir;
}