Why is autopickup on even though I disabled it in nethackrc?

I created an .nethackrc to make nethack fitting my needs with the following line :

OPTIONS=autodig,!autopickup

But even if I disabled autopickup, it is still activated in game and it is very annoying...

I'm running nethack 3.4.3

Any ideas?

Some possibilities:

• Is your config file in the correct location? You can test that by setting some easily visible option like name and starting a new game to see if it has effect.

• Do you have a NETHACKOPTIONS environment variable that might be overriding your options?

• Did you toggle autopickup from the Options menu or press @ by accident while playing?

Changing the autopickup setting in the rc file only affects new games you start after the change. It does not affect games you load from a previous save file.

The reason for this is that you'll often want to change the autopickup settings during the course of a game without affecting future games. So that setting is saved as part of the save file, so that if you change the setting in-game, it will be remembered if you save the game and later load it again. As a consequence changing the rc file won't have any effect on already saved games.