It is even poorly implemented in such ubiquitous tools as ls. For example if I always want output to be sorted by last modified the _only_ point of configuratio

It is even poorly implemented in such ubiquitous tools as ls. For example if I always want output to be sorted by last modified the _only_ point of configuration is the command line. But I can control colors via either the command line or an environment variable. I've lost count of the numbers of times I've straced commands to see where they pull configuration from or grepped thru codebases looking for getenv calls. Any unix consensus for configuration is in theory only not practice. File location is actually pretty germane to precedence. A more "global" configuration cannot be applied if the program is looking for it in the wrong location in the first place. Let's not even discuss the horrible state of where to store local configurations in a users home directory. As long as it starts with a . it's fine :). I've used Linux exclusively for nearly 20 years - but not because I loved its configuration management story.