gls not ls:My system has two forms of ls, the standard "old school" version of ls, and GNU ls which is available as gls. In my shell, I simply created an alias to use gls, but I have not found a way to create the same alias for emacs. As you can probably guess, this impacts my use of dired, which relies on the availability of GNU ls. How do I get emacs to recognize and use the gls instead of ls?
insert-directory-program is a variable defined in ‘files.el’.
Its value is "ls"
Absolute or relative name of the ‘ls’-like program.
This is used by ‘insert-directory’ and ‘dired-insert-directory’
(thus, also by ‘dired’).
This variable may be risky if used as a file-local variable.
Hence:
(setq insert-directory-program "gls")
ls --dired. Hooray!!! On OpenBSD gls is exactly the same as calling ls on Linux. It is one of the catches programmers often run into when attempting to write code for both Linux and OpenBSD. I am so happy! Happy Dance Time!!!
C-h v dired-use-ls-dired. By my reading, its default value should have been avoiding that error; so if that user option was set to its default value and failing to correctly detect the situation, then you should M-x report-emacs-bug so that the detection could be improved.
--dired option, dired-insert-directory simply runs ls --dired behind the scenes and checks whether or not that produced an error, which seems like it ought to be reliable; so I'd think that either the ls implementation is behaving in unexpected ways, or you had that user option customized to enforce the --dired usage.
gls is still going to be the most reliable option, though, so I'm not suggesting that you revert that change.