XDG-USER-DIR(1)

📦
version 0.20 · 13 versions
, in arch rolling, nixpkgs unstable

💫 NAME 💫

xdg-user-dir — bestie's lil helper for finding one of your XDG user dirs ✨

(oh also hiii, this is a page from the User Commands manual, section 1, and it's gonna be so chill i promise 🫶)

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

xdg-user-dir [NAME]

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

okay so picture this: you need to know where one of your special XDG user dirs currently lives, and you don't wanna go digging for it yourself. that's literally the whole job of xdg-user-dir — it looks up the current path for one of the special XDG user dirs and hands it to you 💅

the way it works is you pass in the name of an XDG user dir as the argument, and it goes and finds the path. no cap, that's it.

the possible names you can ask for are these iconic legends right here:

  • DESKTOP
  • DOWNLOAD
  • TEMPLATES
  • PUBLICSHARE
  • DOCUMENTS
  • MUSIC
  • PICTURES
  • VIDEOS

like, one of those. those are your options, bestie 🦋

🗂️ FILES 🗂️

where does it actually look? the values get looked up in the user-dirs.dirs file 🔥

and who makes that file? not you, don't worry — it's created by the xdg-user-dirs-update utility. so like, that's the main character that actually writes it, and xdg-user-dir is just reading the tea 🍓

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable is the one that decides where the user-dirs.dirs file is located. so if you moved that around, that's the vibe that matters 👑

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

💖 AUTHOR 💖

Alexander Larsson <alexl@redhat.com> — Developer 🌟

and that's the whole page, bestie, we ate that up ⭐ this beauty is from XDG, version/date 04/08/2026 — mwah, go find your folders 💜🧚‍♀️

📦 where this page comes from