Re: occasional failure to rename

[martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at>]

 >> Can you make it fail reliably when you do Emacs -Q, open a directory,
 >> and try to rename a file before doing anything else?
 >
 > That worked fine.  (Part of the difficulty here it happens enough to
 > be significant, but not often enough that I notice the pattern of what
 > I did prior to the problem occurring.)

Weird.  Do you use wdired (aka "Edit File Names")?

You could customize `debug-on-error' to t on your system.  This would
give us a clue what caused the bug.

 >>> This does not happen all the time, but when it does the only solution
 >>> I have found is to close out of emacs and restart.
 >>
 >> Do you have to restart Emacs because it's unresponsive or because it's
 >> the only way to make renaming work?
 >
 > Because it is the only way to make renaming work. Everything else
 > continues to work just fine, as far as I can tell.

The next time this happens do

M-: (require 'dired-aux)

and retry (but post the contents of the *Backtrace* buffer here before).
You obviously could put

(require 'dired-aux)

directly in your .emacs, but this would deprive us of any opportunity to
further investigate the cause of this bug.