bug#9039: 24.0.50; dired "f" fails on directory that begins with a space

[Glenn Morris]

Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

> How so?  I have nothing to set it, and it comes up nil.  How is that not
> the defaul then?

Because it's probed for the first time you actually run dired, to see
whether your ls supports --dired. If it does, it gets set to t, if not,
to nil. If you do

C-h v dired-use-ls-dired

this is very obvious:

    dired-use-ls-dired is a variable defined in `dired.el'.
    Its value is t
    Original value was unspecified

    Documentation:
    Non-nil means Dired should use "ls --dired".
    The special value of `unspecified' means to check explicitly, and
    save the result in this variable.  This is performed the first
    time `dired-insert-directory' is called.

> Why isn't GNU Emacs using readdir() and stat() internally?  Why is it
> depending on an external ls?

I don't know. It's a long-standing design decision AFAIK. There
certainly has been no change in this regard for several years, since at
least Emacs 22.1.