Emacs daemon not deleting socket

Question

I run Emacs through the

emacs --daemon

command, which sets up a socket file /tmp/emacs100/server for emacsclient to communicate through. When I kill the server as:

emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"

the socket file remains, preventing me from running emacs --daemon again. The same thing happens when I try M-x kill-emacs from inside Emacs. Alternatively, when I try:

M-x server-force-delete

From within Emacs, I get a message saying:

No connection file "/tmp/emacs1000/server

Any ideas what is going wrong? How do I start and shut down the emacs server smoothly?

Answer 1

i encountered the same problem, apparently

(setq delete-by-moving-to-trash nil)

fix this...

Answer 2

I'm running emacs 23.1.1 and I simply have this line in my .emacs

;; Start Emacs server
(server-start)

and I have never had a problem with sticky socket files.

And emacsclient works nicely.

Answer 3

You don't have to disable the trash globally. Just disable it inside each command that might delete the server file. First define a macro as a shortcut for disabling trash inside a function:

(defmacro bypass-trash-in-function (fun)
  "Set FUN to always use normal deletion, and never trash.

Specifically, the value of `delete-by-moving-to-trash' will be
set to nil inside FUN, so any deletions that happen inside FUN or
any functions called by it will bypass the trash."
  `(defadvice ,fun (around no-trash activate)
     "Ignore `delete-by-moving-to-trash' inside this function.

See `bypass-trash-in-function' for more information."
     (let (delete-by-moving-to-trash)
       ad-do-it)))

Then apply that macro to each of the three server functions that have delete-file anywhere in their body:

;; Any server function that may delete the server file should never
;; move it to trash instead.
(mapc (lambda (fun) (eval `(bypass-trash-in-function ,fun)))
      '(server-start server-sentinel server-force-delete))

Now you can set delete-by-moving-to-trash to anything you like.