I don't want to unconditionally save buffers; I want to conditionally save
them. (Actually, I wouldn't mind if it didn't save the buffers at all; when
I restart emacs, it finds the ".#" files, and that suffices.)

There's a more general problem here (although you might decide it's too
much trouble to fix) -- it seems that when "emacsclient -e" is used, any
prompts go to the non-existent screen rather than to the terminal. (e.g.,
yes-or-n-p's prompt).

Also, save-buffers-kill-emacs does two things: (conditionally) saves the
buffers and deletes the ~/.emacs.d/.emacs.desktop.lock file. On the other
hand, the lower level kill-emacs doesn't delete the lock file (and the
response to bug 55560 is that that's a deliberate design decision). So,
there's no way of doing from the command line
"kill-emacs-and-remove-lock-file", it seems.

On Tue, 24 May 2022 at 00:34, Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>
wrote:

> Peter Ludemann <peter.ludemann@gmail.com> writes:
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> > When I try to kill an emacs server from the command line by:
> >    emacsclient -e '(save-buffers-kill-emacs)'
> > nothing appears to happen if there are any unsaved buffers.
> >
> > I presume that this is because the prompt goes to the usual place (below
> > the mode line in the screen), which of course isn't visible from the
> > command line because there isn't any screen when using "emacsclient -e".
> >
> > This is a follow-up to bug 55560, where it was suggested that kill-emacs
> is
> > inappropriate and instead I should use save-buffers-kill-emacs.
>
> There is an optional ARG which lets Emacs silently save all file-visiting
> buffers without asking. So you must call
>
>   emacsclient -e '(save-buffers-kill-emacs t)'
>
> Best regards, Michael.
>