On 6/26/2013 2:53 PM, g wrote:
Daniel Barclay <daniel <at> fgm.com> writes:
Does anyone recall a mention of what in CygWin (or possibly Emacs) creates
files with a simple name of "NUL"?
Thanks,
Daniel
This has been driving me nuts for years. Finally tracked it down.
These are created by emacs' man.el code when you get a man page.
Reproduce:
In emacs, do:
M-x man <ret>
<enter anything, valid ('ls') or not>
Now, you'll see a NUL file in the directory.
I can't reproduce this with Cygwin emacs. You must be using native
Windows emacs.
Root cause:
construction of the 'man' command that is passed to the shell includes:
(concat " %s 2>" null-device)
The variable `null-device' is platform specific and defaults to a pure-copy
of "/dev/null" which, apparently, becomes "NUL" on windows.
It is a defvar in files.el and 'set' again in dos-w32.el.
Resolution:
In your .emacs file, do:
(require 'dos-w32) ;; load this first to avoid it undo'ing the next line
(setq null-device "c:/tmp/emacs-dev-null.txt") ;; set to anything
Just to be clear, users of Cygwin emacs should *not* do this.
Ken
--
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
