Re: huge files in ~/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 13:39:13 -0700
> From: Kevin Layer <layer@franz.com>
> 
> I just deleted 2.7 GB (yes, you read that right) of files in the above
> named directory.  Wow.  
> 
> The size and contents of 98% of the files in that directory look OK
> (all less than 2K and are a series of pathnames, one per line).  Some
> of the files, however, are really enormous.  They all start out OK,
> but have complete garbage in them after a certain point.  Sometimes
> mail messages.  Sometimes binary data.
> 
> I've seen this on several machines around here, and under several
> users accounts, so it is not isolated to my .emacs/uid.
> 
> Anyone else seen this?  I found only one reference in google
> (http://ww.telent.net/diary/2004/7/#4.78600) to the problem.  It's
> rather hard to search using ".saves-", unfortunately.
> 
> I can easily write a cron job to clean up the problem, but it feels
> like a pretty bad bug to me.

Thanks for reporting, but please provide the necessary details: the
OS, the Emacs version, the works (M-x report-emacs-bug RET will do
that for you).

FWIW, the largest file in my .emacs.d/auto-save-list/ directory is
13KB big, and it has no garbage in it.  There are 75 files there,
created during a year-long period.  This is (various pretests of)
Emacs 22.1 on MS-Windows XP SP2.

In general, if the garbled files were produced by a session that
crashed, that could explain the garbage: after all, Emacs is in deep
trouble when it crashes, and your description sounds like Emacs had
its memory badly trashed.  But I agree that it's a nasty problem that
should be tracked down.  The problem is, we cannot easily do that
without some kind of recipe for reproducing the problem.