Exactly. And you'll find a lot of stuff. Much of the Linux OS' and apps' configuration happens in editable, human-readable 'flat' files. The advantage of this i

Exactly. And you'll find a lot of stuff. Much of the Linux OS' and apps' configuration happens in editable, human-readable 'flat' files. The advantage of this is that you can read and edit them, the disadvantage is that there are a bazillion of competing text formats out there, which each format being a law on its own, as it were. There's also probably a lot of duplication going on in applications that implement their own methods to parse, process, and serialize configuration settings instead of using a common set of well-known tools with well-known properties (features & limitations/bugs). It is a mess.