9. Frequently Asked Questions

• Where can I get the latest TRAMP?

  TRAMP is available under the URL below.

  ftp://ls6-ftp.cs.uni-dortmund.de/pub/src/emacs/tramp.tar.gz

  There is also a Savannah project page.

  https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tramp/

• Which systems does it work on?

  The package has been used successfully on Emacs 20 and Emacs 21, as well as XEmacs 21. XEmacs 20 is more problematic, see the notes in `tramp.el'. I don't think anybody has really tried it on Emacs 19.

  The package was intended to work on Unix, and it really expects a Unix-like system on the remote end, but some people seemed to have some success getting it to work on NT Emacs.

  There are some informations on Tramp on NT at the following URL; many thanks to Joe Stoy for providing the information: ftp://ftp.comlab.ox.ac.uk/tmp/Joe.Stoy/

  The above mostly contains patches to old ssh versions; Tom Roche has a Web page with instructions: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tlroche/plinkTramp.html

  ??? Is the XEmacs info correct?

  ??? Can somebody provide some information for getting it to work on NT Emacs? I think there was some issue with ssh?

• I can't stop EFS starting with XEmacs

  Not all the older versions of TRAMP supported XEmacs correctly. The first thing to do is to make sure that you have the latest version of TRAMP installed.

  If you do, please try and find out exactly the conditions required for the EFS handlers to fire. If you can, putting a breakpoint on efs-ftp-path and sending in the stack trace along with your bug report would make it easier for the developers to work out what is going wrong.

• File name completion does not work with TRAMP

  When you log in to the remote machine, do you see the output of ls in color? If so, this may be the cause of your problems.

  ls outputs ANSI escape sequences that your terminal emulator interprets to set the colors. These escape sequences will confuse TRAMP however.

  In your `.bashrc', `.profile' or equivalent on the remote machine you probably have an alias configured that adds the option `--color=yes' or `--color=auto'.

  You should remove that alias and ensure that a new login does not display the output of ls in color. If you still cannot use filename completion, report a bug to the TRAMP developers.

• File name completion does not work in large directories

  TRAMP uses globbing for some operations. (Globbing means to use the shell to expand wildcards such as `*.c'.) This might create long command lines, especially in directories with many files. Some shell choke on long command lines, or don't cope well with the globbing itself.

  If you have a large directory on the remote end, you may wish to execute a command like `ls -d * ..?* > /dev/null' and see if it hangs. Note that you must first start the right shell, which might be /bin/sh, ksh or bash, depending on which of those supports tilde expansion.

• What kinds of systems does TRAMP work on

  TRAMP really expects the remote system to be a Unix-like system. The local system should preferably be Unix-like, as well, but TRAMP might work on NT with some tweaking.

• How can I get notified when TRAMP file transfers are complete?

  The following snippet can be put in your `~/.emacs' file. It makes Emacs beep after reading from or writing to the remote host.

  (defadvice tramp-handle-write-region (after tramp-write-beep-advice activate) " make tramp beep after writing a file." (interactive) (beep)) (defadvice tramp-handle-do-copy-or-rename-file (after tramp-copy-beep-advice activate) " make tramp beep after copying a file." (interactive) (beep)) (defadvice tramp-handle-insert-file-contents (after tramp-copy-beep-advice activate) " make tramp beep after copying a file." (interactive) (beep))

• There's this `~/.sh_history' file on the remote host which keeps growing and growing. What's that?

  Sometimes, TRAMP starts ksh on the remote host for tilde expansion. Maybe ksh saves the history by default. TRAMP tries to turn off saving the history, but maybe you have to help. For example, you could put this in your `.kshrc':

  if [ -f $HOME/.sh_history ] ; then /bin/rm $HOME/.sh_history fi if [ "${HISTFILE-unset}" != "unset" ] ; then unset HISTFILE fi if [ "${HISTSIZE-unset}" != "unset" ] ; then unset HISTSIZE fi