Re: Update a buffer programmatically

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: elad@cs.bgu.ac.il (Elad Eyal)
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: 26 Oct 2002 04:52:56 -0700
> 
> What I want is to display a read-only buffer called, say "results",
> and have emacs update it automatically every time a file called
> "~/build_log" is modified (by the compiler). The data in buffer
> "results" will be gathered by a lengthy grep operation over 300 or so
> files (this will take about 1 minute).

Why not run Grep as a subprocess of Emacs, and catch its output like
Emacs does in "M-x compile"?

> I'm not sure if I want "results" to be a file or a temp buffer. (I
> might want it to be a file so that it can be accessed from outside
> emacs).

You could use a timer (see timer.el) to cause Emacs to run your
function every now and then, and see whether the file has changed.