[RESEND- orig has not shown up in xemacs.org archives after 48 hours..] I tried to set file-coding-alist to have all files under a certain directory be raw-text-dos. It worked at first, but then consistently failed and set all the files to raw-text-unix instead. Eventually realized that it worked until dired was loaded. When dired is loaded insert-file-contents recurses on itself (via insert-file-contents-internal and dired-handler-fn). Something about this recursion messes up coding-system detection. Repros for me using 21.5.27 on unix, osx, and cygwin. Place the following lisp into a file called "bug.el", then: $ cat /etc/termcap > data $ xemacs -q -l bug.el -f with-dired -- bad $ xemacs -q -l bug.el -f without-dired -- good coding system in *Message-Log* should be raw-text-dos at end. In 'with-dired' case it is raw-text-unix. ---cut--here--- ;; causes "insert-file-contents" to be called 2x via recursion ;; insert-file-contents calls insert-file-contents-internal calls ;; (somehow) dired-handler-fn which calls insert-file-contents (defun with-dired () (message "TEST-WITH-DIRED-LOADED") (require 'dired) (find-file ".") (find-file "./data") (message "CODING SYSTEM: %s" buffer-file-coding-system) (switch-to-buffer-other-window " *Message-Log*") ) (defun without-dired () (message "TEST-WITHOUT-DIRED") (find-file "./data") (message "CODING SYSTEM: %s" buffer-file-coding-system) (switch-to-buffer-other-window " *Message-Log*") ) (add-to-list 'file-coding-system-alist '("data" raw-text-dos) t) ---cut--here--- In without-dired case, the calling sequence looks like: insert-file-contents insert-file-contents-internal But in with-dired case it looks like this: insert-file-contents insert-file-contents-internal (rtns nil **) insert-file-contents insert-file-contents-internal (rtns 'raw-text-dos) Somehow dired-handler-fn is involved in the recursion, but I don't quite understand it. The innermost call to insert-file-contents seems to do the right thing, but the outer one returns nil which is used to overwrite coding-system in this line: (setq coding-system used-codesys) Changing it to: (if used-codesys) (setq coding-system used-codesys)) Seems to fix it... Also, I was concerned that the file was actually being read 2 times, but strace seems to indicate that is not happening. Attaching a version of insert-file-contents with lots of message's added. -- --tony _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta