broken .emacs file

broken .emacs file

[Dan Anderson]

I did something very silly.  I wanted to apply my .emacs file from my
personal user to my superuser, so just did a: #cp -f /home/daniel/.emac*
/root

This messed things up royally though, and rm -fR /root/.emac* doesn't
seem to help (or it just breaks more things).

Is there a command like M-x blank-.emacs-file?

Thanks,

Dan

Re: broken .emacs file

[Barry Margolin]

In article <mailman.76.1063130750.21628.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
Dan Anderson  <dan@mathjunkies.com> wrote:
>I did something very silly.  I wanted to apply my .emacs file from my
>personal user to my superuser, so just did a: #cp -f /home/daniel/.emac*
>/root
>
>This messed things up royally though, and rm -fR /root/.emac* doesn't
>seem to help (or it just breaks more things).

What was the -R option for?  Just plain "rm /root/.emacs" should do it.

>Is there a command like M-x blank-.emacs-file?

The -q option to emacs runs it without loading the .emacs file.  You can
then edit it to correct any problems.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barry.margolin@level3.com
Level(3), Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.

Re: broken .emacs file

[Dan Anderson]

> What was the -R option for?  Just plain "rm /root/.emacs" should do it.

It deletes directories as well as files.  I have a bunch of directories
like .emacs.something ... So it gets rid of them.  -f forces removal, so
I don't get an irritating dialougue asking me to confirm deletion.

-Dan

Re: broken .emacs file

[Peter Boettcher]

Dan Anderson <dan@mathjunkies.com> writes:

> I did something very silly.  I wanted to apply my .emacs file from my
> personal user to my superuser, so just did a: #cp -f /home/daniel/.emac*
> /root
>
> This messed things up royally though, and rm -fR /root/.emac* doesn't
> seem to help (or it just breaks more things).
>
> Is there a command like M-x blank-.emacs-file?

Is it possible you are doing this:

dan$ su
Password: *****
dan$ emacs

Then emacs reads /home/dan/.emacs, but expands ~ internally as /root.  So
you might add ~/emacs-lisp to your load path, which is now not
/home/dan/emacs-lisp, but /root/emacs-lisp, which may or may not
exist.  This causes breakage.  I don't know what the fix for this
might be, except to not run emacs like that.  Try su - instead.

<end crystal ball viewing>

Sorry if my crystal ball is broken.

-- 
Peter Boettcher
boettcher@ll.mit.edu

Re: broken .emacs file

[Dan Anderson]

> Sorry if my crystal ball is broken.

Actually it's right on, thank you.  I will edit the ~/ in the .emacs
file to full path name. 

Thanks again,

Dan