I recently encountered this undesirable side-effect when using the https://github.com/emacscollective/auto-compile library in conjunction with a byte-compiled init file. The combination is reliably resulting in `user-init-file' being set to the .../lisp/progmodes/compile.el.gz path, with ensuing chaos (e.g. customized settings being written to that file -- I first became aware of this problem while using emacs -Q when it suddenly acquired some custom faces from my regular config as something loaded the compile library!). The purpose of the auto-compile package is to ensure that .elc files are always up-to-date and loaded in preference to .el files. I've been using it for many years and wasn't aware of having had any issues with it in the past, but I do not typically have a byte-compiled init.elc file. The auto-compile code advises `load' and `require' (which does seem like it could present risks), however it seems so very odd to me that user-init-file could end up with this value for any reason that it seems like it might ultimately be an Emacs bug. I raised it with the auto-compile maintainer (Jonas Bernoulli, CC'd) at https://github.com/emacscollective/auto-compile/issues/33 and we couldn't make sense of it at the time, so I'm escalating it here. The attached bash shell recipe reproduces the issue in Emacs 29. I can reproduce it in all of Emacs 27, 28, 29, 30 (and not 26.3 or 25.3), but this recipe uses the --init-directory option which was added in 29.1. (See attached script.) The echo area in the final instance of Emacs should report the path to compile.el.gz (and re-running the final "touch init.el && ..." command will repeat that result each time). If I put (debug) at the top of compile.el.gz then I get the following backtrace, so we can see how/why compile.el is getting involved, but it just seems very wrong for that path to be able to end up being the user-init-file value. Debugger entered: nil byte-code(...) compilation-mode() emacs-lisp-compilation-mode() byte-compile-log-file() byte-compile-from-buffer(#) byte-compile-file("/tmp/autocomp/init.el") auto-compile--byte-compile-file("/tmp/autocomp/init.el") auto-compile-on-load("/tmp/autocomp/init" nil) load@auto-compile("/tmp/autocomp/init" noerror nomessage) apply(load@auto-compile ("/tmp/autocomp/init" noerror nomessage)) load("/tmp/autocomp/init" noerror nomessage) startup--load-user-init-file(#f(compiled-function () #) #f(compiled-function () #) t) command-line() normal-top-level() As it seems to have started in Emacs 27, my *guess* is that it's connected to the early-init.el system which was added in Emacs 27, but I've not dug any further at this stage. -Phil In GNU Emacs 29.2 (build 2, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, cairo version 1.16.0, Xaw scroll bars) of 2024-01-19 built on phil-lp Repository revision: ef01b634d219bcceda17dcd61024c7a12173b88c Repository branch: HEAD Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12101004 System Description: Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS Configured using: 'configure --prefix=/home/phil/emacs/29.x.nc/usr/local --with-native-compilation=aot --with-x-toolkit=lucid --without-sound '--program-transform-name=s/^ctags$/ctags_emacs/'' Configured features: CAIRO DBUS FREETYPE GIF GLIB GMP GNUTLS GPM GSETTINGS HARFBUZZ JPEG JSON LCMS2 LIBSELINUX LIBXML2 MODULES NATIVE_COMP NOTIFY INOTIFY PDUMPER PNG RSVG SECCOMP SQLITE3 THREADS TIFF TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS TREE_SITTER WEBP X11 XDBE XIM XPM LUCID ZLIB Important settings: value of $LC_MONETARY: en_NZ.UTF-8 value of $LC_NUMERIC: en_NZ.UTF-8 value of $LC_TIME: en_NZ.UTF-8 value of $LANG: en_GB.UTF-8 value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=ibus locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix Major mode: Lisp Interaction Minor modes in effect: tooltip-mode: t global-eldoc-mode: t eldoc-mode: t show-paren-mode: t electric-indent-mode: t mouse-wheel-mode: t tool-bar-mode: t menu-bar-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t font-lock-mode: t blink-cursor-mode: t line-number-mode: t indent-tabs-mode: t transient-mark-mode: t auto-composition-mode: t auto-encryption-mode: t auto-compression-mode: t Load-path shadows: None found. Features: (shadow sort mail-extr emacsbug message mailcap yank-media puny dired dired-loaddefs rfc822 mml mml-sec password-cache epa derived epg rfc6068 epg-config gnus-util text-property-search time-date mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader cl-loaddefs comp comp-cstr warnings icons subr-x rx cl-seq cl-macs gv cl-extra help-mode bytecomp byte-compile cl-lib sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils rmc iso-transl tooltip cconv eldoc paren electric uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type elisp-mode mwheel term/x-win x-win term/common-win x-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list replace newcomment text-mode lisp-mode prog-mode register page tab-bar menu-bar rfn-eshadow isearch easymenu timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax font-core term/tty-colors frame minibuffer nadvice seq simple cl-generic indonesian philippine cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese eucjp-ms cp51932 hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese composite emoji-zwj charscript charprop case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help abbrev obarray oclosure cl-preloaded button loaddefs theme-loaddefs faces cus-face macroexp files window text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget keymap hashtable-print-readable backquote threads dbusbind inotify lcms2 dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting cairo x-toolkit x multi-tty make-network-process native-compile emacs) Memory information: ((conses 16 77322 5466) (symbols 48 7141 0) (strings 32 20482 1869) (string-bytes 1 617241) (vectors 16 15637) (vector-slots 8 327068 13857) (floats 8 29 46) (intervals 56 248 0) (buffers 984 11))