Re: broken .emacs file

[Peter Boettcher <boettcher@ll.mit.edu>]

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