35 Files

In SXEmacs, you can find, create, view, save, and otherwise work with files and file directories. This chapter describes most of the file-related functions of SXEmacs Lisp, but a few others are described in Buffers, and those related to backups and auto-saving are described in Backups and Auto-Saving.

Many of the file functions take one or more arguments that are file names. A file name is actually a string. Most of these functions expand file name arguments using expand-file-name, so that ~ is handled correctly, as are relative file names (including ‘../’). These functions don’t recognize environment variable substitutions such as ‘$HOME’. See File Name Expansion.