Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!ulysses!allegra!princeton!udel!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!pyramid!prls!mips!hansen
From: hansen@mips.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Emacs kills hard links!
Message-ID: <1343@mips.UUCP>
Date: 16 Jan 88 07:15:30 GMT
References: <280@expya.UUCP> <400@sol.warwick.ac.uk>
Lines: 28
Posted: Sat Jan 16 02:15:30 1988

In article <400@sol.warwick.ac.uk>, maujf@daisy.warwick.ac.uk (Mike Taylor) writes:
>     ...since I changed to emacs, I have been stunned to find that when
> overwriting a linked file, emacs destroys the links, leaving me with only
> one version of the file changed.
> 
> I guess those of you who have been using Emacs since the dawn of time will
> have heard all this many times before, but could anyone tell me a neat and
> simple way around this?  Maybe something I can put in my .emacs file so
> that it maintains links with edited files?

Put the following in your .emacs to cause hard links to be retained:
(setq backup-by-copying-when-linked t)

The following line will also keep the file modes and ownership retained:
(setq backup-bn-copying-when-mismatch t)

Now, can anyone tell me how to get emacs to understand that if
/user/hansen is a symbolic link to /n/electron/vlsi/hansen, that
/user/hansen/.emacs is the same as /n/electron/vlsi/hansen/.emacs, so
it won't open two separate buffers for the same file??? [This occurs
if, while starting with /user/hansen as your current directory, you
enter "emacs .emacs" and then later do a find-file on
"/user/hansen/.emacs"]
-- 
Craig Hansen
Manager, Architecture Development
MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.
...{ames,decwrl,prls}!mips!hansen or hansen@mips.com