With the --device option you can select the character device which lircd should read from. The default currently is /dev/lirc but it probably will change in future.
If you're using the dev/input driver, you can use name=STRING or phys=STRING to select the device; lircd will look in /dev/input to find a device with a matching description. This is useful in case the device name isn't fixed. STRING may contain the '*' and '?' wildcards and '\' to mark them as literal.
With the --listen option you can let lircd listen for network connections on the given port. The default port is 8765. No security checks are currently implemented.
The --connect option allows you to connect to other lircd servers that provide a network socket at the given host and port number. The number of such connections is currently limited to 100.
With the --output option you can select Unix domain socket, which lircd will write remote key codes to. The default currently is /dev/lircd.
With the --pidfile option you can select the lircd daemon pid file. The default currently is /var/run/lircd.pid.
With the --logfile option you can select the lircd daemon log file. The default currently is /var/log/lircd. Note that this option will only be available if you compiled lircd without syslog support.
The config file for lircd is located in /etc/lircd.conf. lircd has its own log file in /var/log/lircd (beginning with LIRC version 0.6.1 you can configure lircd to use syslogd for log messages; then it depends on your system configuration where log messages will show up). You can make lircd reread its config file and reopen its log file by sending the HUP signal to the program. That way you can rotate old log files.
If you start lircd or lircmd from your shell prompt you will usually get back immediately to the prompt. Often people think that the program has died. But this is not an error. lircd and lircmd are daemons. Daemons always run in background.