On: A cron pitfall that will probably snare you at lea...

[raldi]

My guess is they wanted to avoid running .dotfiles and #emacsbackup~ files and threw out the baby with the bathwater.

[pyre → raldi]

Also '.bak' or '.old'

[qntm → pyre]

Isn't ".bak" a fairly logical file extension for a cron job intended to, e.g., perform backups?

[dexen → raldi]

Are #emacsbackup~ files executable by default? If not, that's a very weak reason.

(honestly I dunno; have never used EMACS yet)

[raldi → dexen]

Well, # is actually used for emacs autosave files (or something else regarding open buffers). Making ~ backups is indeed on by default.

Then again, if you're editing files in /etc/ as root and using emacs to do so, you kinda deserve what you get.

[dexen → raldi]

Wait, my intented question was, `do those backup files have the executable permission bits set'? Not `do they hold valid input for interpreter/CPU'.

In Slackware's startup scripts, there's a good bunch of

  if [ -x SOME_FILE ]; then    # if the file is executable, run it
    ./SOME_FILE start
  fi

which makes it trivial to enable/disable various services by simply chmod +x SOME_FILE / chmod -x SOME_FILE. If EMACS' backup files were marked as not executable by the editor, that would be `case closed' for me, no need to pay extra attention to characters in file names.

[ars → dexen]

Yes, backup files have the executable bit set. They have the same bits as the real file.

They are in fact created by renaming the real file to the backup name, then saving the real file and copying the permissions.