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I want to save all open buffers to the relevant files (not an autosave file) at some regular interval (between 5 and 1 minutes).

This seemed like it was the correct solution:

; In ~/.emacs file make following changes.

(require 'auto-save-buffers)
(run-with-idle-timer 5 t 'auto-save-buffers)

But eval-region on this code gives the following error message: eval-region: Cannot open load file: no such file or directory, auto-save-buffers. I run emacs 24.4.

Is the auto-save-buffers functionality no longer available? Is there some other way to do what I want? Is it actually the right tool for saving to the file I have opened rather than a separate autosave file?

I have seen auto-save-buffers-enhanced in the list of available packages (ie. M-x list-packages) and using that instead of auto-save-buffers might be an option, but I'd prefer a solution that only requires things that come with emacs by default.

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

I'm not actually sure what auto-save-buffers is/was; I can't see a reference to it (nor to it being removed).

However if I understand the question correctly, you could do this by ditching the require, and then replacing 'auto-save-buffers with (lambda () (save-some-buffers t)) in the timer call:

(run-with-idle-timer 5 t (lambda () (save-some-buffers t)))

See C-hf save-some-buffers RET for details.

Also, while it's probably obvious from the name run-with-idle-timer, note that your code doesn't do something "every N seconds". It triggers whenever Emacs has been idle for N seconds, and requires an intervening period of not-idle-ness before it can trigger again. In this case I imagine you're entirely happy with that behaviour, however.

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  • Yes, this looks really good, but there is a problem with using it on my system: I'm using the GUI version of emacs in OSX and I get the native looking osx gui popup menu giving me the choice of wether I want to save this buffer, save all buffers, view changes etc. after five seconds, is there some way to override all interactive menus and just save the file? – Var87 Apr 19 '15 at 14:15
  • 1
    That's weird... that argument to save-some-buffers means "don't ask". I can't replicate the problem (but also not using OSX). Which version of Emacs are you running? – phils Apr 19 '15 at 22:23
  • 24.4 (when I do M-x save-some-buffers I get the interactive cli menu in the bottom, by the way) ... this is about aquamacs but may be relevant: stackoverflow.com/questions/15254414/… – Var87 Apr 20 '15 at 20:49
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    Well yes, you certainly will get that prompt (by default) if you call the command interactively via M-x or C-x s. You can bypass that by using a prefix argument: C-u. None of that is relevant to my answer, though, where we're calling the function directly in elisp with that argument pre-set. Did you actually try the code? – phils Apr 20 '15 at 22:40
  • Whoops, sorry about that. I did put some code in my .emacs, but I didn't do it correctly. Thanks for your solution, works perfectly now! – Var87 Apr 21 '15 at 19:32

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