Slackware 12 upgrade - vim backup files

February 19th, 2008 at 9:27 am by Bob Weber (Tech)

Since upgrading to Slackware 12 I’ve noticed vim creates backups of every file I edit by appending the file with a tilde (~).

looks like this is a compilation option for vim 7.1 that comes with Slackware 12. My previous install did not do this, so I’m guessing the compile options were changed for Slackware 12. I confirmed this by running

vim –version

One of the options that is set is
+writebackup

No problem with vim writing backups, in fact it can be good. Only problem I have with it is when I’m working on one of my web development projects I have to be careful not to ftp all of these extra files up to the server. There are two options.

I could disable the backup for vim by adding this to .vimrc

:set nobackup

The other, and better, option is to set a dedicated backup directory

:set backupdir=~/.backup,.,/tmp

Now all of the backup files get created in a single .backup directory. This isn’t a perfect solution. Files with identical names (index.html) will get overwritten, but I’ve never once used a vim backup file, so this is still better than nothing.

For more informations, you might read this article
Are *.swp and *~ files littering your working directory?

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3 Comments

  1. ddesani said,

    April 8, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    Hi.. I’m brazilian and my english is not good =D..
    Just thanks about your post

  2. ed said,

    August 13, 2008 at 9:49 am

    Thanks, this solves a long-standing issue for me!

  3. Schnuff said,

    November 26, 2008 at 4:16 am

    Thanx for posting this. Good idea with the separate backup dir.

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