Re: File manipulation in elisp?

[Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>]

In article <1182370747.377086.236690@a26g2000pre.googlegroups.com>,
 Trastabuga <lispercat@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jun 20, 3:05 pm, Stefan Monnier <monn...@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> > > Is there an API for file management in elisp without opening files in
> > > buffers?
> >
> > No.
> >
> > > directory. So every time I compile a project, as a post-build step I
> > > want to look for some pre-defined file in the directory, read its
> > > content, evaluate the content into elisp and execute it.
> >
> > How 'bout just using `load'?
> >
> >         Stefan
> 
> Thank you Stefan, that works.
> I wonder is there any reason there is no such API for file
> manipulation? No use for it?

Because it would be an enormous amount of work to replicate all the 
operations you can do on buffers in a file API.  And to implement most 
of these things would require copying the file into memory, just like 
opening the file into a buffer.  For instance, most filesystems don't 
provide any way to insert and delete directly in files, you can only 
overwrite them.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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