How do I make diff ignore temporary files like foo.c~? Is there a configuration file that will make ignoring temporaries the default?
More generally: what's the best way to generate a "clean" patch off a tarball? I do this rarely enough (submitting a bug fix to an OSS project by email) that I always struggle with it...
EDIT: OK, the short answer is
diff -ruN -x *~ ...
Is there a better answer? E.g., can this go in a configuration file?
This doesn't strictly answer your question, but you can avoid the problem by configuring Emacs to use a specific directory to keep the backup files in. There are different implementations for Emacs or XEmacs.
In GNU Emacs
(defvar user-temporary-file-directory
(concat temporary-file-directory user-login-name "/"))
(make-directory user-temporary-file-directory t)
(setq backup-by-copying t)
(setq backup-directory-alist
`(("." . ,user-temporary-file-directory)
(,tramp-file-name-regexp nil)))
(setq auto-save-list-file-prefix
(concat user-temporary-file-directory ".auto-saves-"))
(setq auto-save-file-name-transforms
`((".*" ,user-temporary-file-directory t)))
In XEmacs
(require 'auto-save)
(require 'backup-dir)
(defvar user-temporary-file-directory
(concat (temp-directory) "/" (user-login-name)))
(make-directory user-temporary-file-directory t)
(setq backup-by-copying t)
(setq auto-save-directory user-temporary-file-directory)
(setq auto-save-list-file-prefix
(concat user-temporary-file-directory ".auto-saves-"))
(setq bkup-backup-directory-info
`((t ,user-temporary-file-directory full-path)))
You can also remove them all with a simple find command
find . -name “*~” -delete
Note that the asterisk and tilde are in double quotes to stop the shell expanding them.
By the way, these aren't strictly temporary files. They are a backup of the previous version of the file, so you can manually "undo" your last edit at any time in the future.