Emacs and filenotify

Here’s another Emacs quickie. Some time ago I wrote about parsing ssh agent variables in elisp. To recap, the issue was that in windows Emacs is started separately from git-bash, so it doesn’t inherit the environment variables to make it seemlessly use your ssh keys. My quick and dirty solution was to write a function to parse a file containing those variables.

That works fine, but it does mean you have to manually invoke that function. You could run the function on load, but then you have to remember to start git-bash first.

It’s not an ideal situation, and the other day I finally wondered if Emacs had any file-watching library… of course it does.

(defvar ssh-file-watcher nil)

(when (require 'filenotify nil t)
  ;; We're loading up, slurp SSH envs in case in they're already
  ;; correct:
  (mh/parse-sshagent-env)
  ;; Clear any existing watcher:
  (if ssh-file-watcher
      (file-notify-rm-watch ssh-file-watcher))
  ;; Create the new watcher:
  (setq ssh-file-watcher
        (file-notify-add-watch (expand-file-name "~/.ssh/agent.env")
                               '(change attribute-change)
                               'mh/parse-sshagent-env)))

In other words, another 5 minutes of hacking and now we simply load the variables just in case, clear any existing watcher, and start watching the file for changes — when it does, we simply slurp again. If you follow this verbatim, the only addition you’ll need to make is to ensure that your callback function accepts the arguments filenotify will give it; I just ignored them: (defun mh/parse-sshagent-env (&rest ignored)...

Much more painless!


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