Is $HOME/.local/share the default value for $XDG_DATA_HOME in Ubuntu 14.04?
As report in XDG Base Directory Specification environment variables aren't set by default bug, Ubuntu doesn't set XDG variables.
According to FreeDesktop Base Directory Specification:
$XDG_DATA_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific data files should be stored. If $XDG_DATA_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.local/share should be used.
Applications that implement this specification must implement this behaviour, so if $XDG_DATA_HOME
is not defined they must use $HOME/.local/share
as default.
There are some implementation of this specification, like: Glib, libghc-xdg-basedir-prof and pyxdg
If you want to override this value, you should define XDG
variable in /etc/profile
or better in /etc/profile.d
as described in Where should the XDG_CONFIG_HOME variable be defined?
Here's how I set it in my ~/.bashrc
:
export XDG_DATA_HOME=${XDG_DATA_HOME:="$HOME/.local/share"}
This keeps any value already set, else sets it to the default value specified in the XDG Base Directory Specification