From: utzoo!decvax!cca!z
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: Ucbmail users watch out for Zimmerman"s emacs
Article-I.D.: cca.3242
Posted: Mon Oct 25 13:05:37 1982
Received: Wed Oct 27 03:47:33 1982
References: tpdcvax.188

Sorry about your problems with the mail help file.  We got around this
problem long ago by including the expression 
	-a ! -name '*.help.~'
in the "find" statement in /usr/lib/crontab.  Unfortunately, when I
wrote up the instructions for the installation of EMACS, I forgot that I
had done this.  This was recently pointed out to me, and at that time I
added a cautionary note to the README file.  You seem to have a version
of EMACS which predates that one.

On the question of backup files in general, tilde actually seems to be a
good choice.  Aside from the mail help file, no other file on Unix uses
it in the trailing position.  It is one of the few special characters
which is neither heavily used nor is a special character to any shell
(at least in the trailing position).  I think that its use by the C
shell to mean "home directory" also causes people to stay away from
casual use of it.

Then there is the question of whether to use a leading or trailing
backup file indicator.  We like the trailing indicator for two main
reasons:  1) Backup files appear next to the files they back up in "ls
-ls" listings, making it easy to compare sizes, dates, etc.  2) You can
see only your primary files by doing something simple like "ls -ls *.c",
or whatever.  If you really want to see both primary and backup, you can
do "ls -ls *.c?".  Prepended backup characters don't seem to be as
flexible.  As for backing up a 14 character file name, EMACS deletes the
last character and replaces it with a tilde.  This is just as good as
prepending a character to a 14 character file name.  Of course, when
4.2BSD arrives with 256 character filenames, this problem will go away.

	Steve Zimmerman
	decvax!cca!z
	z@cca