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Re: File losing ownership
- From: Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>
- To: Colin JN Breame <colin at breame dot net>
- Cc: cygwin at cygwin dot com
- Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:40:53 -0500 (EST)
- Subject: Re: File losing ownership
- References: <200503091711.03207.colin@breame.net>
- Reply-to: cygwin at cygwin dot com
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Colin JN Breame wrote:
> I have a file such that:
>
> $ ls -l test
> -rw-r--r-- 1 Administrators None 6 Mar 9 17:00 test
>
> I open it and save in emacs.
>
> $ ls -l test
> -rw-r--r-- 1 colin None 7 Mar 9 17:00 test
>
> Is this a bug?
This is a design "feature" in emacs (and most of the Windows editors as
well). None of them write files in-place. What they do is create a copy
of the file with the changes from the editing session. The inode is also
changed (easy to check), so what you're seeing is a brand new file. The
old one, IIRC, is renamed to "test~" (I don't use emacs, so can't check).
This, BTW, is one of the reasons you can't use emacs as crontab editor, or
anything else that expects the file to be written in-place.
Igor
P.S. I think I'm being a bit unfair ("I'm a VIm guy"), and you *can*
configure emacs to write files in-place -- it's just not done by default.
--
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