Random thanks to emacs: emacs doesn't care if the filesystem exists

Random thanks to emacs: emacs doesn't care if the filesystem exists

[Ian Kelling]

I regularly mount and unmount the filesystem which holds my .emacs.d and
lots of files emacs has open, and umount doesn't care, and emacs doesn't
care, wheras most other programs need to be killed or else umount does't
work. Thanks.

- Ian

Re: Random thanks to emacs: emacs doesn't care if the filesystem exists

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

> I regularly mount and unmount the filesystem which holds my .emacs.d and
> lots of files emacs has open, and umount doesn't care, and emacs doesn't
> care, wheras most other programs need to be killed or else umount does't
> work.  Thanks.

Indeed Emacs doesn't really support "file handles": there's no way to
separate `open` from `read` in ELisp, instead we only have
`insert-file-contents` which does the open+read+close (same holds for
`write` with `write-region`).

That's a blessing and a curse,


        Stefan