Question

I’m trying to write a plugin that calls a function (icalendar-import-file) which has the nasty side effect of opening between 1 and 3 buffers every time it is called, and sometimes I want to call it a whole bunch of times.

I can’t even find a function that will list buffers without popping up a new buffer, which is a little frustrating.

As far as I can tell that defun (ical...) doesn’t return anything useful, so the two obvious solutions to me are to either: (1) set a variable to a list of buffers before I run the function, and then sweep through the buffers that exist after the function exits and delete the new ones, (something like save-excursion, but for buffers) or (2) somehow suppress the creation. It looks like ical... is pretty heavily dependent on this, though, so I’m not sure that that’s feasible.

Answer 1

Are you looking for the function :

buffer-list is a built-in function in
`C source code’.

(buffer-list &optional FRAME)

Return a list of all existing live
buffers. If the optional arg FRAME is
a frame, we return the buffer list in
the proper order for that frame: the
buffers in FRAME’s `buffer-list’ frame
parameter come first, followed by the
rest of the buffers.