I'm talking about files like ~/.foo found on a user's home dir. I'm working on a program that reads from such a file, and I'd also like to clean up my user root directory if I can.Is there a POSIX-specified variable, such as ~/$(conf) where config like .emacs can be found? 
Is there a standards-specified location for user configuration files?
configuration;directory structure;home
POSIXSearching through the specification for the strings user config or configuration files turned up zero hits, so I would say no it doesn't specify this in any way.http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/FHSLooking at the FHS - Filesystem Hierarchy Standard it had this bit:User specific configuration files for applications are stored in the user's home directory in a file that starts with the '.' character (a dot file). If an application needs to create more than one dot file then they should be placed in a subdirectory with a name starting with a '.' character, (a dot directory). In this case the configuration files should not start with the '.' character. 11.sysconf/getconfLooking through the list of POSIX configuration constants present in <limits.h> is the only other place I can think of where something like this would be configured. Running the command getconf <var> will return these types of results.For example:$ getconf _POSIX_CHILD_MAX1024But looking through the list of definitions I don't see any pertaining to a user's home directory.limits.h - implementation-defined constantsunistd.h - standard symbolic constants and typessysconf - get configurable system variables