file settings

The answer is conf_path().

The backstory is we are making a new 'modules', 'themes', or 'files' level folder inside sites/whatever: 'config', to store configuration settings in files.

This would be the ultimate way to get a listing of all ini files in modules, and could do the same thing for 'config' -- this grabs from the currently in use sites directory (such as sites/default) as well as sites/all, profiles, and the built-in modules directory:

drupal_system_listing('.ini$', 'modules', 'name', 0);

why does Drupal have its own .ini style parsing function - http://d6-api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_parse_info_file - instead of using PHP's parse_ini_file - http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.parse-ini-file.php ? (no, this is not academic for me!)