What is the difference between .ini and .conf?

Question

As mentioned, what is the difference? or is there any concern to use them?

Answer 1

Unlike DOS-based OSes, in Unix and Linux file extensions are mostly meaningless outside of human-readable reasons. INI is a configuration file standard.

A .conf file could be an INI file, or it could be any other configuration system that the application supports. MySQL, for example, uses the file my.cnf by default for configuration, which is an INI file.

Answer 2

INI files has a format roughly like this:

[heading1]
key1=value
key2=value

[heading2]
a=1
b=2

etc...

The line endings are usually 10 13 (\n\r, windows style) instead of just 10 (\n, unix style).

Conf files, on the other hand, are more varied. They may have the same formatting as ini files, or something completely different, like this:

# A comment
button 1 {
  name "hello"
  "text" hi.there
  "more..." {
    "something 123"  bla.bla "123"
  }
}

# Another comment
button 2 {
  # hello
}

you get the idea...

.conf files usually have the unix style line endings, at lest on unix-like systems. It is frowned upon for .conf files on unix-like systems to have windows style line endings.

TL;DR; ini files usually have windows style line endings and a fixed layout, while conf files have their roots in unix-like systems and can have almost any kind of layout