user-dirs.defaults(5)

user-dirs.defaults5

Default settings for xdg user dirs

Overview

The /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults file is a text file that contains the default values for the XDG user dirs which are used by the xdg-user-dirs-update command.

This file contains lines of the form

NAME=VALUE

The following names are recognised:

DESKTOP

DOWNLOAD

TEMPLATES

PUBLICSHARE

DOCUMENTS

MUSIC

PICTURES

VIDEOS

The values are relative pathnames from the home directory and will be translated on a per-path-element basis into the users locale.

Lines beginning with a # character are ignored.

Environment

XDG_CONFIG_DIRS

The user-dirs.defaults file is located in this directory. The default is /etc/xdg.

Releases

7 releases since Debian 8 (Jessie); the text changed 5 times.

  1. 8
  2. 9
  3. 10–11
  4. 12
  5. 13
  6. Arch

Author

Alexander Larsson <[email protected]>

Developer

From xdg-user-dirs 0.20-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.