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.
Certainly not. Nothing should write to /usr/bin except for the package manager in FHS distros and some distros binary directories aren’t writable at all.
I agree. Usually I’m referring to a user installed local application. So if the executable is in your home directory likely it’s in the same directory as the exe.
Even then you shouldn’t be writing where the executable is. I don’t want spurious files where my scripts etc. are.
Just use XDG dirs.
Well good because a program shouldn’t be writing to its config file either.