Why does emacs dired not display the same files as the Windows “Explorer” (e.g. Windows/System32/config)

Question

(Emacs 24.3.1 i386-mingw-nt6.1.7601 of 2013-03-17 on MARVIN)

Emacs dired of C:Windows/System32/config displays only the directories:

• '..'
• 'systemprofile'
• '.'
• 'TxR'
• 'RegBack'
• 'Journal'

in the directory.

Windows Explorer displays 33 other files, mostly ".LOG", ".LOG1" or ".LOG2" files, but also

• SOFTWARE
• DEFAULT
• SYSTEM
• SAM
• BCD-Template
• COMPONENTS{[hash]}
• ...

My original suspicion was that the content of that directory is accurately displayed by dired (i.e. the files are not really there) but a cygwin ls -al shows the files that dired does not display. Is this one of Windows7 misdirections or is my Emacs config wrong or ...?

Answer 1

From the manual:

Dired uses an internal lisp implementation of ls by default on Windows. For consistent display of symbolic links and other information with other programs (eg Cygwin) and performance reasons, you may want to use a Windows port of ls instead.

(setq ls-lisp-use-insert-directory-program t)      ;; use external ls
(setq insert-directory-program "c:/cygwin/bin/ls") ;; ls program name