Determining characteristics of configuration files

A computer program product for performing configuration management of a computer, the computer program product comprising one or more computer readable storage medium and program instructions stored on at least one of the one or more computer readable storage medium, the program instructions comprising:

• program instructions to identify, by the computer, candidate configuration files from among a plurality of files from a training machine by searching the content of the plurality of files from the training machine for keywords associated with configuration items of the machine, wherein a configuration item is a configuration parameter or information that needs to be indicated when installing a system on a machine;
• program instructions to extract, by the computer, file attribute values of the identified candidate configuration files, wherein the file attribute values have a variable portion;
• program instructions to cluster, by the computer, candidate configuration files identified as having the same configuration item keywords, based on the extracted file attribute values;
• program instructions to classify, by the computer, each cluster of candidate configuration files related to a configuration item as being configuration files related to the configuration item or as not configuration files;
• program instructions to determine, by the computer, for each cluster of candidate configuration files identified as having the same configuration item keywords, one or more file attribute values that can be used to determine when a candidate configuration file is a configuration file related to the configuration item;
• and
• program instructions to determine, by the computer using a learning algorithm, the configuration file related to the configuration item from among each cluster of the candidate configuration files based on a result of the determination that the each cluster of candidate configuration files identified as having the same configuration item keywords, wherein the learning algorithm is selected from a group consisting of:
• a support vector machine (SVM), a decision tree, and a K nearest neighbor (KNN);
• and
• based on determining the configuration file is related to the configuration item, program instructions to replace the variable portion with a predetermined identifier.