Globally stop editors from creating ~ files

Question

Is there a global setting to prevent all text editors from creating backup files? I'm sick of changing it in 11 different places.

Answer 1

This actually makes a rather strong argument for "learn one editor well".

FWIW, the .vimrc statement would be "set nobackup".

Answer 2

As far as I know, there is no single environment variable or configuration setting that is checked by every UNIX editor.

For Emacs, you can turn off file backups for all files by inserting this into your ~/.emacs:

(setq backup-enable-predicate (lambda (path) nil))

GEdit has a boolean configuration key /apps/gedit-2/preferences/editor/save/create_backup_copy that you can set with gconf-tool.

I'm quite sure there are as many ways to turn backups off as there are editors. :-)

Answer 3

As others have said, there is no cross-editor configuration options. But, here is one pathological solution:

1. Write a script that does something like the following:

   find / -iname "*~" -exec rm {} \;
   

2. Add this script as a cron job that runs every so many minutes.

If you are just interested in keeping your dropbox folder clean, change the / to the appropriate folder. I'll bet an even more interesting solution can be created by using incron.

Answer 4

There is an environment variable VERSION_CONTROL which works for Emacs and other Gnu utilities (unless some gnome inside my computer has been fooling me or something). Whether this works for other things I don't know.

Answer 5

Use a read-only filesystem.