Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > > Consider the _very_ common case (that nobody has mentioned yet) where you
> > > are editing a large file. When you write to the file, the editor copies
> > > the file to a backup, then immediately truncates the original file and
> > > writes the new data there. What would be _far_ preferrable is to
> > > just
> >
> > Are you sure? I think editor just _moves_ original to backup.
>
> It would be so nice if all editors did that, but most don't according to the
> tests I've done, especially the newer ones like kedit, gnome-edit etc. I
> think this is largely due to developers not knowing why it's good to do it
> this way.
Moving the original to make a backup is a _bad_ thing if the original
might be hard-linked and you'd like all instances to be written to.
OTOH it'a a good thing if you're using hard links for poor man's version
control (`cp -rl'). Hey :)
Emacs does this perfectly with `backup-by-copying-when-linked' (an
option you can change, but I like it on).
-- Jamie
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 23 2001 - 21:00:23 EST