The following reference is a small extract from two books I read to become familiar with GTK programming. This is not a summary of this books but more for keeping things in mind. I hope not to hurt some license terms using some parts here. If so please write me and I will get rid of these things or prevent access with password. But for now I see no need for this. To learn such things it is necessary to read more about GTK than only read the part below.
My book recommendation:
In the background the daemon gconfd supervise the configuration files. To stop this daemon use:
gconftool-2 --shutdown
and to start it again:
gconftool-2 --spawn
To get all values:
gconftool-2 -R
Read a value:
gconftool-2 -g /path/to/value/as/dektop/gnome/...
To set a value:
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/../dir value
See python section for an example to supervise a certain value.