Enter your bug report in this message, including as much detail as you possibly can about the problem, what you did to cause it and what the local and remote machines are. If you can give a simple set of instructions to make this bug happen reliably, please include those. Thank you for helping kill bugs in TRAMP. --bug report follows this line-- I visit a file in an unwritable remote directory. I modify the buffer. I try to save my changes. The operation fails. The only error message is "tramp_exit_status 2" in the "*tramp/METHOD HOST*" buffer. Turning on tramp-debug-buffer reveals that what failed was attempting to copy the file to a backup file name. This works fine locally and via ange-ftp, so I think it should work in TRAMP. Emacs : GNU Emacs 20.4.1 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu, X toolkit) of Sat Sep 25 1999 on porky.devel.redhat.com Package: tramp ($Id: tramp.el,v 2.0.2.6 2001/07/16 09:54:52 grossjoh Exp $) current state: ============== (setq tramp-ls-command nil tramp-test-groks-nt nil tramp-file-exists-command nil tramp-current-multi-method nil tramp-current-method nil tramp-current-user nil tramp-current-host nil tramp-auto-save-directory nil tramp-default-method "su" tramp-rsh-end-of-line "\n" tramp-remote-path '("/bin" "/usr/bin" "/usr/sbin" "/usr/local/bin" "/usr/ccs/bin" "/local/bin" "/local/freeware/bin" "/local/gnu/bin" "/usr/freeware/bin" "/usr/pkg/bin") tramp-login-prompt-regexp ".*ogin: *$" tramp-password-prompt-regexp "^.*\\([pP]assword\\|passphrase.*\\): ? *$" tramp-wrong-passwd-regexp "^.*\\(Permission denied.\\|Login [Ii]ncorrect\\|Received signal [0-9]+\\|Connection \\(refused\\|closed\\)\\|Sorry, try again.\\|Name or service not known\\).*$" tramp-temp-name-prefix "tramp." tramp-file-name-structure '("\\`/r\\(@\\([a-zA-Z0-9]+\\)\\)?:\\(\\([-a-zA-Z0-9_#]+\\)@\\)?\\([-a-zA-Z0-9.]+\\):\\(.*\\)\\'" 2 4 5 6) tramp-file-name-regexp "\\`/r[@:]" tramp-make-tramp-file-format "/r@%m:%u@%h:%p" tramp-end-of-output "/////" shell-prompt-pattern "^[^#$%>\n]*[#$%>] *" backup-by-copying nil backup-by-copying-when-linked t backup-by-copying-when-mismatch t nil nil )