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Re: Cygwin crashed by emacs???


Since you say it occurs after modifying an ediff buffer, I suspect
it's related to a problem that has annoyed me for some time.


ediff is one of several emacs packages that produces buffers that
  1) aren't associated with an existing file, and
  2) are given names containing characters that cannot appear in 
      a Windows file name e.g., > <


If you modify one of these buffers, autosave will eventually try to
save it. Since there is no existing file, autosave tries to generate a
new file name.  It does this, in part, by replacing any illegal
characters in the buffer name by something else. However, the code in
the files.el function make-auto-save-file-name appears to only
consider the characters % / and " illegal. For CygWin, I think, this
list should be expanded to  include * ? > < | : and \

When ediff (or emerge or vm or ...) create a buffer with one of these
characters in the name and autosave actually tries to write out a file
with that name, emacs locks up - no response and no screen refresh. It
usually seems to come back after several seconds, but I can imagine
that, in some circumstances, the consequences could be worse.


I've tried to modify the function in files.el to expand the list of
illegal characters. Unfortunately, files.el is one of the
"pre-compiled" Lisp files - the only way to change it is, AFAIK, to
recompile emacs. And I have had no luck doing that with the gcc 3.x
compiler. (I can create temacs, but cannot dump that to create emacs.)
So I have no idea if my attempted modification actually works.




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