[comp.unix.ultrix] DEC's .DX* files for X applications

asente@adobe.com (Paul Asente) (02/09/91)

In article <59525@aurs01.UUCP> roberson@aurs01.uucp (Charles "Chip" Roberson) writes:
>I just recently started using an NCD Xterm hosted from an DEC 5000
>workstation.  I'm currently using DIgitals version of several of the
>applications (DXterm, DXclock, DXsession, etc.).  Some of these have
>the file ~/.DX* (e.g. ~/.DXclock) mentioned in their respective man
>pages, some do not.  I have also noticed that some of these applications
>may actually use a ~/.DX* file even though it is not documented.
>
>Can somebody shed some light on the logic behind these files?

These files are the per-user per-application defaults files.  If you look
at them, they are X resource files.  You can find this documented in the
Xt Intrinsics documentation.

The main use for these files is to store program-generated customization
information.

Note that due to a case of version skew or misediting of the spec (I'm not
quite sure which, and different people will tell you different things) early
and perhaps current versions of the DECwindows toolkit use a different
convention for naming these files from that used by the MIT Intrinsics.  The
DECwindows convention is the application class preceded by a period, and
the MIT convention is just the application class.

	-paul asente
		asente@adobe.com	...decwrl!adobe!asente