Re: dired fails when ls exits with >0

[Frederik Fouvry]

,-- On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:24:12 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
| 
|     In Emacs 21.3.1, it works fine: the directory is listed together with
|     the error message in Dired mode.  The difference seems to be that in
|     the pretest version of Emacs, an error is raised when
|     `insert-directory-program' returns non-zero.
| 
| Are you saying that ls produces a useful directory listing
| and then returns nonzero starts?  I think maybe that's what you
| are saying, but I cannot tell for certain.

Yes, ls may return a nonzero exit code together with a normal (and
almost complete) listing.  For instance:

$ \ls /courses; echo $?
c-kurs.winter.98         koreman.EinfASR.03     thorsten.winter.97
connectionism.winter.01  koreman.PercRate.03    vsem-kurs.summer.2000
korbay.winter.2002       spiel.softw-proj.2001
0

(because no stat or lstat is done), but

$ \ls -l /courses; echo $?
ls: /courses/koreman.EinfASR.03: Permission denied
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           46 Dec  7 16:08 c-kurs.winter.98 -> 
/a/troll/export/becks/courses/c-kurs.winter.98
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           43 Dec  7 16:08 connectionism.winter.01 
-> /a/troll/export/becks/courses/connectionism
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           48 Dec  7 16:08 korbay.winter.2002 -> 
/a/troll/export/becks/courses/korbay.winter.2002
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           49 Dec  7 16:08 koreman.PercRate.03 -> 
/a/troll/export/becks/courses/koreman.PercRate.03
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           35 Dec  7 16:08 spiel.softw-proj.2001 
-> /a/troll/export/becks/courses/spiel
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           48 Dec  7 16:08 thorsten.winter.97 -> 
/a/troll/export/becks/courses/thorsten.winter.97
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           34 Dec  7 16:08 vsem-kurs.summer.2000 
-> /a/troll/export/becks/courses/vsem
1

Frederik Fouvry