I find the author's intent and meaning to be rather straightforward to understand: he's a Unix sysadmin, so I think it's understandable that he's speaking about

I find the author's intent and meaning to be rather straightforward to understand: he's a Unix sysadmin, so I think it's understandable that he's speaking about programs executed on a Unix-like system that a sysadmin is likely to administrate. So no, nor a washing machine nor a car ECU is expected to do this (not until sysadmins are paid to administrate them at least). As for technicians that might need to configure one someday, those people are usually expected to already know where to look, or at least to be able to read their documentation correctly. And anyway, car ECUs and washing machine usually provide a UI for configuration and don't rely on config files as a primary mode of configuration. As for GUI programs, if they use a human readable config file under the hood, or if they accept a config file as input (some let the user change some simple settings through their UI but uses a config file to change more advanced settings), yes they should have a way to show where it is (either through a command, or through the settings UI for example). I don't really know what you are talking about with the pages of a flash memory... Since in Unix, everything is a file, it will be read through a file anyway, not directly through pages. Same thing for offboard: just display the path to the file, wherever it might physically be. And if you really are in the most rare and hypothetical scenario where your program reads its config directly from the pages of a flash memory, just have it display "The config is read from the last [two] page[s] of <this flash memory> when invoqued with --help.