Re: Why won't this command kill a buffer?

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

B. T. Raven wrote:
> Joe Fineman wrote:
>> "B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net> writes:
>>
>>> If you really mean "append" (put at the end) then this works
>>> (on msw2000 with Emacs 22.3):
>>>
>>> "
>>> append-to-file is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `files.el'.
>>> It is bound to <f4>.
>>> (append-to-file START END FILENAME)
>>>
>>> Append the contents of the region to the end of file FILENAME.
>>> When called from a function, expects three arguments,
>>> START, END and FILENAME.  START and END are buffer positions
>>> saying what text to write.
>>> "
>>>
>>> Interactively I had bound this function to f4 in .emacs
>>> (define-key global-map [f4] 'append-to-file)
>>> I made a test file with a few chars in it and saved it.
>>> Inserted backspace into buffer with C-q *backspacekey* and then made
>>> that single character (shows as ^?) the region and pressed f4.
>>> Inspection of the last character of the file appended to shows:
>>>
>>> Char: DEL (127, #o177, #x7f) point=5 of 5 (80%) column=0
>>>
>>> I assume that what can be done interactively can also be done
>>> programmatically.
>> Thank you.  I will give that a try.  It may turn out to be a nuisance,
>> tho, that it requires inserting the character in the current buffer &
>> then deleting it.  The function I defined is usually run in the
>> background, and it might cause confusion in that it would cause the
>> current buffer to be marked as modified, and might interact oddly with
>> my keying.  What I would really like is an append-to-file command that
>> takes as its argument an arbitrary character or string, rather than a
>> substring of the current buffer.
> 
> 
> It looks like Emacs sees such a procedure as too low-level. Since it
> operates on files in buffers you would have to do
> find-file-other-window, select-window, (goto-char (point-max)) and then
> insert the char. I haven't been able to insert \ via elisp though. All
> the functions produce 92, \nil, or "\\" or worse. I thought of creating
> a file with only backslash in it and then running (shell-command "cat
> file bacsla >> file") but if you need the character parameterized then
> you need to shell-command on a program that does fputc on the file
> opened for append.


On w32 (shell-command "echo \\ >> test") appends a backslash to file "test".