In Emacs, you can find, create, view, save, and otherwise work with
files and file directories. This chapter describes most of the
file-related functions of Emacs Lisp, but a few others are described in
27. Buffers, and those related to backups and auto-saving are
described in 26. 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 by calling 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 section 25.8.4 Functions that Expand Filenames.
When file I/O functions signal Lisp errors, they usually use the
condition file-error (see section 10.5.3.3 Writing Code to Handle Errors). The error
message is in most cases obtained from the operating system, according
to locale system-message-locale, and decoded using coding system
locale-coding-system (see section 33.12 Locales).
Please take a moment to fill out
this visitor survey You can help support this site by
visiting the advertisers that sponsor it! (only once each, though)
