Re: dired-move-to-filename-regexp

[Paul Eggert]

Lars Hansen <address@hidden> writes:

> Can you explain the reason for this change? (lisp/ChangeLog.8):
>
> 1999-02-16  Paul Eggert  <address@hidden>
> * dired.el (dired-move-to-filename-regexp): Prepend .* so that we
> find the last match if there are multiple matches.

It was because some combinations of link-count, user and group name
and/or number, and sizes looked like dates, and this broke Emacs
dired.

> It has the consequence that file names starting with a date, as in the
> attached example, are not correctly identified.

Yes.  There's no way in general to solve the problem if you stick with
ordinary "ls" output, as it is textually ambiguous if you are trying
to parse all the "ls" versions out there.  The best we can do is to
use heuristics.  (Currently one of the heuristics is, "Please don't
use file names that start with strings that look like dates and are
followed by spaces."  :-)

I thought RMS had recently implemented support for GNU "ls -lD" in CVS
Emacs.  That should solve the problem in general when GNU "ls" is
being used, since "ls -lD" exactly identifies where each file name is.
The problems you're running into would then occur only with non-GNU
"ls", for which the obvious solution is to install GNU "ls".