Sounds like obsessive compulsive disorder to me 
Gurus either just know or just have confidence.
*NIX,like Rials, is about conventions.
Things are in conventional places: /etc/ /home, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin/
/usr/share/man/, all depending on context.
Of course all this can be overridden. You can set PATH, NLSPATH,
MANPATH, TIMEFORMAT, TMOUT, TMPDIR, MAILPATH, CDPATH and others to
affect how the shell behaves; you can override the default configuration
file locations of programs by environment variables and parameters.
See documentation on LD_PRELOAD, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and other LD_*
variables influence the behaviour of the dynamic loader/linker;
LANG (and its children that affect the print formatting libraries -
LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, LC_TIME, cf.
locale(5)); TERM, The terminal type for which output is to be prepared;
PAGER, the user’s preferred utility to display text files;
EDITOR/VISUAL, the user’s preferred utility to edit text files.
The TZ and TZDIR environment variables affect how time is formatted and
displayed.
There are then application specific variables. You might them in your
shell start-up or in scripts. Ones that might be of interest to
ruby/rails include
RUBY_VERSION, which determines the path under /usr/lib/ruby
GEM_PATH
The last if on use if you are on hosted machine and don’t have root
permission to install gems. You can create a directory ~/rubygems and
install them there and set GEMPATH to search there before the system
gems.
Try running various programs with “–help” on the command line to see
what options exist. Red the manual pages or the developers pages.
Try running the ‘env’ command to see what environment settings are
current.
In many ways *NIX is simpler to understand than Windows. The
configuration files are usually text files, one for each application,
and the settings have text documenting them; the settings not employed
are also documented there.
Of course there will always be programmers who roll out applications
that fail to follow the conventions. Some are just arrogant, some have
come form other environments (not just Windows) and aren’t familiar with
the conventions yet.
Rails claims to favour convention over configuration. In reality it had
followed the *NIX Way of the configuration is in the convention.
Ah, it was all so much easier 30 years ago …
Ryan B. said the following on 10/12/07 06:23 PM:
I wouldn’t recommend touching any of the files located in these
[TOP lINE: is there a linux program that will tell me where all the
I'm not comfortable that they all simply work.... I wanna know where
EveryThing IS...!!!
Can any guru tell me the BEST way/app to learn with..?
–
Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Saint Jerome, On the Epistle to the Ephesians