What is the provenance of .gtkrc-xfce?

Question

I'm currently setting up a Linux Mint 21.3 Xfce Edition installation, and part of that is tidying up the dotfiles in the home directories.

There aren't that many that can be moved in the base installation, and xdg-ninja has been a great help, but it does not have anything to say about one dotfile: .gtkrc-xfce.

I've tried searching around on the internet and there are currently no obvious results for it in the GTK documentation or the Xfce documentation.

Where has this dotfile come from? Is there a way to get it to respect the XDG base directory specification?

Answer 1

Two approaches spring to mind:

1. Look for the filename in all the executable binaries in $USER's $PATH. Take appropriate action.
2. Set a trap, have $USER do business as usual (plus weekly, monthly, yearly "special" tasks), and see what breaks.

Here's how:

1. Lookin' here, lookin' there, lookin' everywhere' -- Jim Bryson

find $(echo "$PATH" | tr ':' ' ') -executable -print0 | \
  xargs -0 -r grep -F --files-with-matches --binary-files=text '.gtkrc-xfce'

2. Set the trap.

chmod 000 .gtkrc-xfce

No read/write/execute permission for owner, group, or world. Now we wait ... and wait ...

Or, if the contents are uninteresting, or it's a 0 byte file, just decide it's a leftover from an unsuccessful experiment, and delete it.