Tag: config file

About

In computing, configuration files, or config files, are used to configure the initial settings for some computer programs. They are used for user applications, server processes and operating system settings. The files are often written in ASCII (rarely UTF-8) and line-oriented, with lines terminated by a newline or carriage return/line feed pair, depending on the operating system. They may be considered a simple database. Some files are created and modified using an ASCII editor. Others are created and modified as a side-effect of changing settings in a graphical user interface (GUI) program. The formats of configuration files are often poorly documented.[citation needed]

Some applications provide tools to create, modify, and verify the syntax of their configuration files. For server processes and operating system settings, the only documentation may be the source code. Some configuration files are partially described by man or help pages.

Some computer programs only read the configuration files at startup. Others periodically check the configuration files for changes. Some can be told to re-read the configuration files and apply the changes to the current process, or indeed to read arbitrary files as a configuration file. There are no standards or strong conventions.

Recently, XML and YAML have become popular as configuration file formats. They have the advantages of having well-defined syntaxes, and tools to validate and verify the syntax of the files that are created in those formats.

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Config_file

 

Cat a file, without the comments

I recently had to install a couple of squid servers to act as reverse proxies for a webcluster. You can teach the squid server to stand in between in the end users and the webservers, and to store all the static content ( .jpg .flv .css .htm for example ) in the RAM. This saves a lot of I/O and bandwidth on the webservers, and it can really speeds up a site. And the end of the road the webservers' load dropped with 92%. But before all this worked, I had to run through a massive config file and since the squid config file is their manual at the same time, it's about 5000 lines long. So I had to find out a way to filter only the important settings from the config file.