How to get emacsclient working on a different machine?

Question

I've been using emacsclient successfully, however, recently, I needed to move to a different machine and on the new machine it fails with the error:

emacsclient: can't stat /tmp/esrv1140-hostname: Success

So errno is zero, hence the Success message at the end, but something has gone wrong.

Searching the web, I saw to make sure you have run server-start in Emacs, which I have, but perhaps it failed to stay up? How can I check that server-start was successful? What else might be causing the can't stat error?

Answer 1

You can confirm the server is running by checking the process list; on Unixy platforms, try ps aux | grep -i emacs, and on Windows, bring up Task Manager via Ctrl-Shift-Esc and check for an Emacs process.

The path cited in the error message suggests an Emacs server's default Unix socket location, but if it's always the same every time, you may have it hardcoded somewhere, possibly in a shell alias around emacsclient or a shell script by that name. If /usr/bin/emacsclient (or your local equivalent, in /usr/local/bin or wherever) works, but bare emacsclient doesn't, this is almost certainly the case; find that script or alias and remove it, and you should cease to see the problem.