two .ledgerrc in $HOME

[lipp f]

$ find ~ -name \*.ledgerrc

/home/<user>/.ledgerrc
/home/<user>/t14.ledgerrc

The default one supposed to be for myself and t14 for my business. Expecting to be completely separated. Each file has one or more --file entry, no overlap.

$ ledger -i ~/t14.ledgerrc stats 

and

$ ledger -i ~/.ledgerrc stats

show actually only the default data, never the t14. 

I was expecting that whenever an init file is specified, the default one wouldn't be used. Is this a bug?

[Enrico Lamperti]

It's the expected behavior. Dotfiles in your home folder usually have global settings, so having more than one is a bad practice. 

You may have your common rules in it, and then in the directory where you have each ledger file (e.g. `~/work` and `~/personal`) you can have another `.ledgerrc` with specific settings for each project if you need.

Also, instead of sourcing many files with `--file` you may use includes in a main ledger file, e.g.:

    include accounts.ledger

    include 2022.ledger

    include 2023.ledger

    include loans/friends.ledger

Then you just have to specify this file with `--file` and all the others will be included as you want.

This could even simplify your two `.ledgerrc` files down to a single one, because if you specify e.g. "--file main.ledger", I think it should work in both directories.

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[lipp f]

If I understand you correctly ~/.ledgerrc should never contain --file or --include options, but only general options, and each project should be contained in its own folder. I still have couple of questions:

- when I have an  ~/.ledgerrc and another  .ledgerrc in project folder, is the second one loaded, assuming that working directory is  project folder when I invoke ledger? Which order?

- the documentation for include says "Include the stated file as if it were part of the current file. The file name can contain a wildcard (‘*’) to refer to multiple files (e.g. ‘bank/*.ledger’)" which is really useful. Is there any way to specify the working directory in .ledger or to use shell variables for include / file options?

TIA.

[lipp f]

I did some more testing:

- once you have the ~/.ledgerrc, a working directory  .ledgerrc gets ignored

- -i and --init-file have inconsistent behaviour (according to the documentation, it should be the same, but it is not)

$ cat ~/.ledgerrc
--date-format %Y-%m-%d
--sort date
--effective
--real

$ ledger  stats
Error: No journal file was specified (please use -f)

$ ledger -i .ledgerrc stats
Error: No journal file was specified (please use -f)

$ ledger --init-file .ledgerrc stats
Time period: 2000-01-01 to 2023-10-24 (8697 days)

  Files these postings came from:
  < correct list of files here >

  Unique payees:            2273
  Unique accounts:            96

  Number of postings:      10191 (1.2 per day)
  Uncleared postings:        724

  Days since last post:        1
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