When bitcoin-cli is run, it, not bitcoind creates an empty ~/.bitcoin/wallets direcctory with ~ bring home of currently running user. This is weird and leads to user confusion because it happens even in cases when bitcoin-cli connects to a bitcoind running under a different user or probably on other machine.

Expected behavior

bitcoin-cli never modifies filesystem, especially not things that the daemon should take care of.

Actual behavior

bitcoin-cli creates empty directory

To reproduce

0. make sure ~/.bitcoin does not exist under user A
1. install bitcoind and run it under a user B
2. run bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo under user A
3. ls ~/.bitcoin under user A

For quick setup, you can try to use my project in a Debian VM or using provided Docker file. Just apt install bitcoin-regtest bitcoin-cli, it's already pre-configured to run under a different user, so then just running sudo bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo && sudo ls /root/.bitcoin should reproduce the issue.

System information

0.20 official release downloaded from https://bitcoin.org/bin/bitcoin-core-..., verified GPG signature from Wladimir.

OS: Linux Debian Buster
CPU: Intel x86_64
Disk: NVMe SSD
FS: ext4

I don't think configuration is relevant since bitcoin-cli is not informed where to find it (via parameters or otherwise) and thus it can not access it. I also added -rpcport and -rpccookiefile parameters explicitly but I don't think it's relevant.

Loosely related to #16220, but not a duplicate.