viewing files crashes emacs

viewing files crashes emacs

[Tom Goldring]

I'm using emacs 28.2 on a Mac laptop. Normally I view or edit files from 
Dired by putting the cursor on a file name and typing V (to view) or 
pressing Enter (to edit). This used to work perfectly well and still 
does for most files, but now there are some text files (mostly perl 
scripts, usually having no extension) that will cause emacs to 
completely lock up so nothing I do within emacs has any effect, and all 
I can do is kill the process from the command line or using "Force Quit 
Applications from the OS), and then run emacs again. This will happen 
consistently for some files but not for most others. I don't know if the 
affected files contain one or more characters that cause this to happen, 
because they behave normally if I "cat" them from the shell or view them 
with TextEdit.

Any help would be appreciated!

Tom

Re: viewing files crashes emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2024 01:06:57 -0500
> From: Tom Goldring <proto.enigma@verizon.net>
> 
> I'm using emacs 28.2 on a Mac laptop. Normally I view or edit files from 
> Dired by putting the cursor on a file name and typing V (to view) or 
> pressing Enter (to edit). This used to work perfectly well and still 
> does for most files, but now there are some text files (mostly perl 
> scripts, usually having no extension) that will cause emacs to 
> completely lock up so nothing I do within emacs has any effect, and all 
> I can do is kill the process from the command line or using "Force Quit 
> Applications from the OS), and then run emacs again. This will happen 
> consistently for some files but not for most others. I don't know if the 
> affected files contain one or more characters that cause this to happen, 
> because they behave normally if I "cat" them from the shell or view them 
> with TextEdit.

I suspect that this is due to some infloop in python.el which we
already fixed in Emacs 29.  So please try upgrading to Emacs 29, and
if that doesn't solve the problem, report a bug with an example of a
file that causes such lockups.

Re: viewing files crashes emacs

[Stefan Monnier via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

> for most files, but now there are some text files (mostly perl scripts,
> usually having no extension) that will cause emacs to completely lock up so
> nothing I do within emacs has any effect, and all I can do is kill the

These kinds of problem can have various sources, with various
workaround/remedies/fixes.
I recommend you:
- Try it with a more recent version of Emacs.
- If you can still reproduce it with the latest Emacs,
  `M-x report-emacs-bug`, ideally with the offending file in attachment
  so we have a chance to try and reproduce the problem on our end.


-- Stefan