dead "last" link

[foice]

Hello,
I have been playing around with restoring tmux session on different machines of our little cluster. Now all session are off and I am left with one only. I give the "save" command and tmux save the session seemingly fine.

Unfortunately the restore does not work, because it complains that the restore file is missing. Indeed the .tmux/resurrect folder has these latest added files

-rw-r--r--. 1 me 1.9K Jul 21 02:13 tmux_resurrect_2015-07-21T02:13:37.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 me 1.9K Jul 21 02:14 tmux_resurrect_2015-07-21T02:14:37.txt
lrwxr-xr-x. 1 me 38 Jul 29 10:57 last -> tmux_resurrect_2015-07-29T10:57:33.txt

and the link is pointing to file that does not exist ... any idea what is wrong here?

Cheers,
Roberto

[bruno-]

That's really really unusual. Linking last to the "real" file happens at the end after the file already exists.

The logic for creating the resurrect file and last symlink is in scripts/save.sh file here.

I really have no idea how to start with this so do you maybe wanna do some simple debugging? Maybe put echo 'foobar' >> "$resurrect_file_path" somewhere before line 260 and then verify the file gets created after save.

[foice]

Thanks for your reply. Will do the test.
Might this be related to me saving sessions from different machines in sparse order?

[bruno-]

Thank you!

Might this be related to me saving sessions from different machines in sparse order?

Hm, I don't understand the above.. are you maybe doing a save on one machine and then trying to restore on another machine? This "feature" is not really supported. It is assumed you make a save and restore on the *same* computer.

[foice]

That is what I have done a zillion times, and worked. Now I am back to a one machine case, and it does not work anymore. Maybe makes sense to just clean the whole folder "resurrect" and start from an empty one?

[foice]

cleaning up the resurrect folder did the job :)

[bruno-]

Good to hear the issue is solved.
I'm going to close this one (even though we're not sure what happened there). Please report if an error happens again.

[foice]

Actually I wanted to ask why can't I keep two branches of history of my tmux(es).

I mean if I take the bother to manually rename my resurrect folder on each machine I can keep saving on folder resurrect2 on machine2 and resurrect1 on machine1.

What is the difficulty to script this down?

[bruno-]

If I understand it correctly, you wanna be able to change the default directory where tmux-resurrect saves files? There's an option for this, it's explained here

[foice]

Thanks a lot for suggesting this solution, I think is the right way to attack the problem.

I suppose this can be safely be a variable that depends on the hostname, e.g.

set -g @resurrect-dir "$HOME"'/.tmux/my-resurrect/'"$HOSTNAME"'/' 

Do you see any issue with this? I am testing it and seems to work so far.

As a side thought I would ask if on pressing the "resurrect" key stroke one could get a prompt for which of the subfolders of ~/.tmux/resurrect/ to restore from, possibly with a default coming from set -g @resurrect-dir

PS
Am I mistaken or subfolders of .tmux/resurrect are special? for some reason

   set -g @resurrect-dir "$HOME"'/.tmux/resurrect/'"$HOSTNAME"'/' 

does not seem to work.

[bruno-]

Hey,
I tested this:

set -g @resurrect-dir $HOME/.tmux/$HOSTNAME

and $HOSTNAME isn't expanded (but $HOME is). I'm guessing this is because $HOSTNAME variable isn't present in the output of tmux show-env -g.
If you first do tmux set-env -g HOSTNAME foobar then things work and resurrect will save to: ~/.tmux/foobar.

So I think you're having this issue because tmux's environment doesn't know about $HOSTNAME.

Btw. after you set @resurrect-dir, you can check its value with tmux show -g @resurrect-dir command.

~/.tmux/resurrect is the default, but I don't think it's special by any means. Try using literal value for the directory name, eg set -g @resurrect-dir ~/foo/bar and things should work.

[foice]

Hi, I have maybe phrased my message in a incorrect way, but $HOSTNAME is expanded just fine in my environment. However what you say could save some other person having such issues. Plus the tmux show -g @resurrect-dir tip is helpful.
Thanks for stepping in.
Roberto

[bruno-]

Ah, okay. I focused on the last part of your previous message. Glad to hear things work.