Emacs/emacs/Copying-and-Naming
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18.11 Copying, Naming and Renaming Files
Emacs has several commands for copying, naming, and renaming files.
All of them read two file names, old
(or target
) and
new
, using the minibuffer, and then copy or adjust a file’s name
accordingly; they do not accept wildcard file names.
In all these commands, if the argument new
is just a directory
name (see Directory Names in the Emacs Lisp Reference
Manual), the real new name is in that directory, with the same
non-directory component as old
. For example, the command
M-x rename-file RET ~/foo RET /tmp/ RET
renames ~/foo
to /tmp/foo
. On GNU and other POSIX-like
systems, directory names end in ‘/
’.
All these commands ask for confirmation when the new file name already exists.
M-x copy-file copies the contents of the file old
to the
file new
.
M-x copy-directory copies directories, similar to the
cp -r
shell command. If new
is a directory name, it
creates a copy of the old
directory and puts it in new
.
Otherwise it copies all the contents of old
into a new directory
named new
.
M-x rename-file renames file old
as new
. If the
file name new
already exists, you must confirm with yes or
renaming is not done; this is because renaming causes the old meaning
of the name new
to be lost. If old
and new
are on
different file systems, the file old
is copied and deleted.
If a file is under version control (see Version Control), you should rename it using M-x vc-rename-file instead of M-x rename-file. See VC Delete/Rename.
M-x add-name-to-file adds an additional name to an existing file without removing the old name. The new name is created as a hard link to the existing file. The new name must belong on the same file system that the file is on. On MS-Windows, this command works only if the file resides in an NTFS file system. On MS-DOS, and some remote system types, it works by copying the file.
M-x make-symbolic-link creates a symbolic link named
new
, which points at target
. The effect is that future
attempts to open file new
will refer to whatever file is named
target
at the time the opening is done, or will get an error if
the name target
is nonexistent at that time. This command does
not expand the argument target
, so that it allows you to specify
a relative name as the target of the link. However, this command
does expand leading ‘~
’ in target
so that you can easily
specify home directories, and strips leading ‘/:
’ so that you can
specify relative names beginning with literal ‘~
’ or ‘/:
’.
See Quoted File Names. On MS-Windows, this command works only on
MS Windows Vista and later. When new
is remote,
it works depending on the system type.
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