emacs why do I have hashes at the ends of my file names i.e. #test.c#

Question

I am using emacs 22.2.1 on Ubuntu 9.04.

Every time I open a file and work on it, and then when I list the files in the directory in the terminal I see hashes at the ends of each file.

i.e.

#test.c#
#test.h#

Why is this and how can I remove them?

Many thanks for any advice,

Answer 1

It's a backup (autosave) file. Emacs should remove them when it finishes editing the file, unless it dies or you kill it without saving the files. It's better not to remove these files since if you do, you cannot recover if Emacs should crash for some reason. When you start Emacs again you can recover the file with M-x recover-this-file to recover it from the backup.