Re: Error using TRAMP to visit a directory

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Alan Hadsell <ahadsell@mtdiablo.com>
> Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:46:03 -0400
> Cc: 
> 
> I receive an error when I try to visit a directory with TRAMP (2.1.5)
> with GNU Emacs (22.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2007-06-02 on
> RELEASE).  The target system is a CentOS GNU/Linux system.  I get the
> following backtrace when I set debug-on-error:

Thank you for your report.

Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce this problem on my XP machine (using
a different target system and directory name, of course).

> ,----
> | Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Format specifier doesn't match 
> argument type")
> |   format(" %-8d" "al")
> |   ls-lisp-format("." (t 9 al users (18053 26543) (16508 26097) (18053 
> 16924) 4096 "drwxr-xr-x" nil 3855200 (-1 1)) 4096 (97 108) nil (18053 30091 
> 970000))
> |   
> ls-lisp-insert-directory("/plink:al@fibonacci.pacengr.com:/home/al/build/scarab-1.0-b19/"
>  (97 108) nil nil t)
> |   
> insert-directory("/plink:al@fibonacci.pacengr.com:/home/al/build/scarab-1.0-b19/"
>  "--dired -al" nil t)

Sounds like Tramp is using ls-lisp emulation instead of running `ls'
remotely, which I don't think what should happen.  Can you post here
the contents of your *Messages* buffer with messages from Tramp
describing its workings, so we could see what it did?

> It appears to be trying to format the user name ("al") with format
> "-8d", which certainly isn't going to work.  Not sure why the data is
> not in the expected format.  

I think the data is in the expected format, but it is unexpectedly
processed by ls-lisp, which does not expect the user and group that
aren't numeric.