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I've read that most editors will replace the file when you actually want to save changes to that file How to execute a command whenever a file changes?. So how does VIM behave?

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math
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1 Answers1

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it might depend on various settings related to 'backup', everything that has to keep a copy of the file as it was before the write happened. one of settings that controls that is: 'backupcopy':

When writing a file and a backup is made, this option tells how it's done. This is a comma separated list of words.

The main values are:

"yes"    make a copy of the file and overwrite the original one
"no"     rename the file and write a new one
"auto"   one of the previous, what works best

so, depending on your vimrc (backup set and backupcopy to no), vim might rename a file. when

akira
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  • Yeah this also complies with my observation that inotifywait printed the same inode number that has changed.. – math May 04 '12 at 11:46
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    comment on @math's comment: i changed the answer quite a bit after his comment. the former version stated that the test i did wrote into the same inode / file. but since my vimrc runs without `backup` ... not a valid test :) – akira May 04 '12 at 14:31