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I have Emacs open but accidentally I’ve deleted the .emacs file it read when it started. This represents about 15 years of tweaking. (I know, I know, backups.)
Is there a way to get Emacs to write out the .emacs file I’ve deleted?
I wouldn’t normally ask such a lame question on SO but I know I only have a day or so before this Emacs session ends.
As ayckoster suggests, you might try a file recovery or forensics tool like The Sleuth Kit. Or, and this may seem crazy, if you’re on a Unix-like system, you could search through the raw disk device (on the Mac I’m currently on, that would be /dev/rdisk1). Seriously, several times I’ve been too lazy to break out a full-blown recovery tool but instead used something like
sudo less -f /dev/rdisk1, searched for a string I knew was in the file (global-set-key, anyone?), and succeeded in recovering the file’s original content.