Why does emacs create temporary symbolic links for modified files?

Solution 1:

Update: Emacs 24.3 has been released with full support for this new setting!

In the current trunk of emacs, you can simply customize the variable create-lockfiles:

C-h v create-lockfiles

Documentation: Non-nil means use lockfiles to avoid editing collisions.

In your init file, you can set

(setq create-lockfiles nil)

Get it via

bzr branch bzr://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/emacs/trunk emacs-trunk
make
src/emacs

(I found out about this, because I decided to get active and just add an option like that myself… :) )

Solution 2:

The symbolic link is emacs' file interlocking system: the symbolic link indicates that an instance of emacs is editing this file. If another instance tries to edit the same file, emacs will issue a warning. See http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Interlocking.html

This has nothing to do with auto-save.

I cannot find how to modify or disable file locking from within emacs.