Re: Dired confused by filenames starting with date-like strings

[Jesse Alama <alama@stanford.edu>]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

> kg6mar@gmail.com writes:
>> Dired gets confused by certain filenames in which the beginning
>> resembles a date and there is an embedded space (my photograph naming
>> convention).  It fails to assemble the entire filename.
>
> This works correctly on my system, because dired invokes ls with the
> "--dired" option (a feature of GNU ls, which causes ls to output extra
> information about where the names are located).
>
> The variable `dired-use-ls-dired' controls whether dired does this or
> not.  So to fix this problem, try installing GNU ls (I guess that means
> cygwin, as you're on ms-windows?) and setting dired-use-ls-dired to t.

After following this discussion I wanted to set this variable to `t'.
I didn't want to use `setq' to I tried setting the variable using
cusomize-variable.  But I see in dired.el that dired-use-ls-dired is
defined as follows:

(defvar dired-use-ls-dired (not (not (string-match "gnu" system-configuration)))
  "Non-nil means Dired should use `ls --dired'.")

Would anything go wrong if this variable were customizable?

Jesse

-- 
Jesse Alama (alama@stanford.edu)