@Gilles I just found out that vim lets you edit a file you have no write access to by unlinking it and then creating it again. Is there a way to force emacs to do that?

And no, I can't think of any good reason why you would want to. Feels more like a bug than a feature.

@terdon “is there a way … emacs …” → yes, obviously

doesn't it do that automatically?

Um. Dunno, let me check. I assumed not.

if it doesn't, I know there's an option to tell it, I don't know the name by heart but I'm sure I've mentioned it in answers on Unix & Linux before

No, it doesn't. Now that I think about it, I seem to recall seeing something like that as well.

backup-by-copying and related

I was just quite stumped by what appeared to be vim circumventing file system permissions. Felt much better when I figured out what was actually happening.

@terdon it makes sense in some scenarios, e.g. a group-writable directory where people tend to have umask 022 → individual files are 644 even if they're meant to be edited by the group

But editing it resets the permissions and ownership to the default.

Of course, that happens anyway if you save the file, true.

no such thing as a default

s/a/your/

@terdon Is

> I wasn't suggesting that you didn't read review contents.

Ta-da:

^--- Linux 0.99 running in Debian 0.91

@NathanOsman Congratulations?