Embarassing emacs file~ question

michaelsanford · 03-18-2005, 12:20 AM

I've got a really silly question about emacs. I usually use pico but I've decided to get a little more GNUy and delve into emacs and vi.

I'm a bit confused about how emacs deals with buffers though. Sometimes when I edit a file I end up with a (temp?) file~, but sometimes I don't.

So: What is this file ? How do I clear it if it's present (without using rm) ?

shobhit · 03-18-2005, 03:18 AM

file~ is the backup file emacs creates automatically for you, when you edit a file.
this way you can step back one edit of the file if you want to undo your changes.
file~ is created only when you edit the file. if you open the file and simply read it without editing, then no file~ is created.
also file~ is not a temporary file, its just a copy of your old file.

using emacs you can safely edit system files to try new settings, if they don't work then getting the default sys file is as easy as
mv file~ file

CARTMAN · 03-18-2005, 03:31 AM

Thats a backup file when you modify a file that has a revision ( like in a cvs,svn repo. copy ) it will backup file as file.~revision~ which is quite useful.

michaelsanford · 03-18-2005, 09:08 AM

Why didn't I assume Stallman would include something so clever.

This is actually very, very useful for what I'm doing.

Thanks!