Re: Command to re-read current file?

[Peter Lee <pete_lee@swbell.net>]

>>>> bill  writes:

    bill> If the file corresponding to the current buffer changes on
    bill> disk, and I want the buffer to reflect the new version, I
    bill> normally do "C-f [RET] yes".  It bugs me to have to answer
    bill> 'yes' (or even 'y') in these cases.  Is there a command to
    bill> tell Emacs, "re-read the file from disk and don't ask me
    bill> about it"?

,----[ C-h f revert-buffer RET ]
| revert-buffer is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `files'.
| (revert-buffer &optional IGNORE-AUTO NOCONFIRM PRESERVE-MODES)
| 
| Replace current buffer text with the text of the visited file on disk.
| This undoes all changes since the file was visited or saved.
| With a prefix argument, offer to revert from latest auto-save file, if
| that is more recent than the visited file.
| 
| This command also works for special buffers that contain text which
| doesn't come from a file, but reflects some other data base instead:
| for example, Dired buffers and buffer-list buffers.  In these cases,
| it reconstructs the buffer contents from the appropriate data base.
| 
| When called from Lisp, the first argument is IGNORE-AUTO; only offer
| to revert from the auto-save file when this is nil.  Note that the
| sense of this argument is the reverse of the prefix argument, for the
| sake of backward compatibility.  IGNORE-AUTO is optional, defaulting
| to nil.
| 
| Optional second argument NOCONFIRM means don't ask for confirmation at
| all.  (The local variable `revert-without-query', if non-nil, prevents
| confirmation.)
| 
| Optional third argument PRESERVE-MODES non-nil means don't alter
| the files modes.  Normally we reinitialize them using `normal-mode'.
| 
| If the value of `revert-buffer-function' is non-nil, it is called to
| do all the work for this command.  Otherwise, the hooks
| `before-revert-hook' and `after-revert-hook' are run at the beginning
| and the end, and if `revert-buffer-insert-file-contents-function' is
| non-nil, it is called instead of rereading visited file contents.
`----

    bill> But this is a relatively trivial issue.  A far more
    bill> important question is the following meta-question: how could
    bill> I have figured out the answer to the previous question on my
    bill> own?  I tried apropos with various query strings, such as
    bill> "re-find", "re-open", "re-visit", and variants thereof, but
    bill> they yielded nothing.  Is there a better approach to finding
    bill> the command for an Emacs functionality?

You could have done 'M-x apropos-documentation RET reread'.
apropos-documentation is handy when the command name is not intuitive.