Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!rpi!rpi.edu!tale From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs Subject: Re: Various small comments about Emacs (moved from the end of a bug report) Message-ID: Date: 8 Jun 89 14:54:35 GMT References: <1989JE8.090959,4635;ULMO@SSYX.UCSC.EDU> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu Lines: 37 In-reply-to: ulmo@ssyx.ucsc.edu's message of 8 Jun 89 09:15:33 GMT In article <1989JE8.090959,4635;ULMO@SSYX.UCSC.EDU> ulmo@ssyx.ucsc.edu writes: > - Using ln to link a file and then edit it, Emacs will save the old > version associated with the same old link, and the file will end up > with a new inode, link structure, file descriptor, directory entry, > etc. This isn't always intended or understood by the user (me), > although I can see benefits and hardships both ways. I've been meaning to look at this one and see how the link could be preserved. The fellow who handles the /export partitions on our primary fileservers has exactly the same problem with the ring of files he has ln'ed. He wants to edit just one of the files (any file) and have the link preserved so that all of the others see the change. He prefers to use Emacs but has taken to vi'ing these files because it will preserve the link. Somewhat hand-in-hand with this is the file gets written out with new owner information (last time I tried this was a few months ago; we've been avoiding the problem in the meantime). % ls -l ~X/README -r--r--r-- 1 X 4258 Oct 26 1988 /appl/imagine1/X/README % sudo emacs ~X/README [change made, revision saved] % ls -l ~X/README -r--r--r-- 1 root 4258 Oct 26 1988 /appl/imagine1/X/README Perhaps a quick fix here would be for the original file owner to be noted and then have the file chown'ed back. This solution doesn't work, however, for the case where I am in the same group as a file owner and I edit a mode 664 file. Once again, vi happens to work as expected under these circumstances. Dave -- (setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@itsgw.rpi.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet")) "I realize the Internet isn't the whole world, but it is the center of it." -- Greg Woods