On Fri, 5 Apr 2024 at 16:09, david sowerby <d_sowe...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hi, in Vim/Neovim I can save a copy of the file when I exit. The copy is > renamed file-$(date +%s).bak. This gives me a file with an increasing number > plus .bak. It looks like "date+%s" and "&stime" do the same thing. Is this > possible in vile? I know I can save a file as file.bak but I like to save a > series of changed files, not just one.
I vaguely recall dealing with operating systems which did this (VMS? MVS?). Every file save added a new version, and you had to periodically run `PURGE` to recover disk space. An alternative is to stash each write in a version control system. In a previous job (more than a decade ago, before git existed), all of our production servers had the attached script installed as both `viw` (update file and send diff), and a link as `vis` (silently update file). This logged changes to any production files (typically in /etc), and stashed them in version control so you could easily revert a problem change; see the difference b/w versions, etc. Note that this script will prompt for a description of the file on first commit, and a reason for the change in subsequent updates. This worked pretty well for us at the time, and didn't version every file, just the ones we cared about. --bod
viw
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