Backup Ubuntu Settings - How to ?

[spazz2]

Fu :
"A few years ago, we had a discussion about this in the forums after someone used sudo gedit on a brand new install and ended up not being able to run a browser or any gnome programs because root:root had owned the ~/.config/ directory."
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O_O root owning root and preventing root from accessing config stored in root ?
meta-root and meta privileges ?

That's how it sounds to this clueless lay-person.

I know this was directed to oldfred but :
Thank you for this "rant" , ie. very useful information.
I'm sure keeping this in mind will prevent me from making an awful goof in the near future.

[TheFu]

O_O root owning root and preventing root from accessing config stored in root ?
meta-root and meta privileges ?

That's how it sounds to this clueless lay-person.

Not meta at all, just requires understanding that
/home/thefu == $HOME == ~/

If HOME is set to /root/, then ~/ == /root/
But if HOME is set to /home/thefu, then ~/ == /home/thefu.

HOME is set at login by the value set in the password entry - getent passwd thefu
HOME is an extremely important environment variable. Generally, no management of it is needed, but with sudo you can end up with a program running with root as the userid, but HOME still set to the normal user account's value. This is almost always bad, but it is the GUI programs that tend to automatically create and write settings to the HOME directory. CLI programs just don't do this. I don't know why. This is why sudo nano isn't so bad, but sudo gedit is terrible.

Claro?