Re: safe way to add contents to a file ?

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

Thank you for your comments.

> On Dec 18, 2019, at 22:10, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>
> writes:
> 
>>> What have you looked for?
>> 
>> The files chapter, the buffers chapter. It's all descriptions of
>> function after function and overall very confusing when you don't know
>> the basics of what's necessary.
> 
> IMHO the Elisp reference is not the place to teach how file systems
> handle content.

Yes but I'm not writing binary (or even C) code here. I'm using a high-level 
language that is supposed to hide the complexity of all that machinery and help 
me think at a higher level.

> As Stefan noted the Emacs workflow is not all that
> different from what you could do with most popular APIs (POSIX, WIN32,
> etc).

No issue about that.

> I think that the info nodes "Buffer basics" and the linked "Visiting
> files" give a good hint about how to solve your task, supposing that you
> know that on most operative systems it is not possible to directly
> insert content on a file and you need to fake the operation.

I was naïvely thinking that inserting contents in a file is a frequent enough 
task (think xml nodes for ex), and actually even more frequent than appending, 
that there would be a relatively standard workflow proposed in the reference.

Stephan proposed that we consider inserting some extra info in the reference. 
When I'm done sorting my thing, I'll work on that.


Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune