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To invoke Dired, type C-x d (dired
). This reads a
directory’s name using the minibuffer, and opens a Dired buffer
listing the files in that directory. You can also supply a wildcard
file name pattern as the minibuffer argument, in which case the Dired
buffer lists all files matching that pattern. A wildcard may appear
in the directory part as well.
For instance,
C-x d ~/foo/*.el RET C-x d ~/foo/*/*.el RET
The former lists all the files with extension ‘.el’ in directory ‘foo’. The latter lists the files with extension ‘.el’ in all the subdirectories of ‘foo’.
On Posix systems, when the system shell supports globstar, a recursive globbing feature, and that support is enabled, you can use recursive globbing in Dired:
C-x d ~/foo/**/*.el RET
This command produces a directory listing with all the files with extension ‘.el’, descending recursively in all the subdirectories of ‘foo’. Note that there are small differences in the implementation of globstar between different shells. Check your shell manual to know the expected behavior.
If the shell supports globstar, but that support is disabled by
default, you can still let Dired use this feature by customizing
dired-maybe-use-globstar
to a non-nil
value; then Dired
will enable globstar for those shells for which it knows how (see
dired-enable-globstar-in-shell
for the list of those shells).
The usual history and completion commands can be used in the minibuffer; in particular, M-n puts the name of the visited file (if any) in the minibuffer (see Minibuffer History).
You can also invoke Dired by giving C-x C-f (find-file
)
a directory’s name.
Typing C-x C-j (dired-jump
) in any buffer will open a
Dired buffer and move point to the line corresponding to the current
file. In Dired, move up a level and go to the previous directory’s
line. Typing C-x 4 C-j (dired-jump-other-window
has the
same effect but opens a new window for the Dired buffer.
The variable dired-listing-switches
specifies the options to
give to ls
for listing the directory; this string
must contain ‘-l’. If you use a prefix argument with the
dired
command, you can specify the ls
switches with the
minibuffer before you enter the directory specification. No matter
how they are specified, the ls
switches can include short
options (that is, single characters) requiring no arguments, and long
options (starting with ‘--’) whose arguments are specified with
‘=’.
Dired does not handle files that have names with embedded newline
characters well. If you have many such files, you may consider adding
‘-b’ to dired-listing-switches
. This will quote all
special characters and allow Dired to handle them better. (You can
also use the C-u C-x d command to add ‘-b’ temporarily.)
Dired displays in the mode line an indication of what were the
switches used to invoke ls
. By default, Dired will try to
determine whether the switches indicate sorting by name or date, and
will say so in the mode line. If the dired-switches-in-mode-line
variable is as-is
, the switches will be shown verbatim. If
this variable’s value is an integer, the switch display will be
truncated to that length. This variable can also be a function, which
will be called with dired-actual-switches
as the only
parameter, and should return a string to display in the mode line.
If your ls
program supports the ‘--dired’ option,
Dired automatically passes it that option; this causes ls
to
emit special escape sequences for certain unusual file names, without
which Dired will not be able to parse those names. The first time you
run Dired in an Emacs session, it checks whether ls
supports
the ‘--dired’ option by calling it once with that option. If the
exit code is 0, Dired will subsequently use the ‘--dired’ option;
otherwise it will not. You can inhibit this check by customizing the
variable dired-use-ls-dired
. The value unspecified
(the
default) means to perform the check; any other non-nil
value
means to use the ‘--dired’ option; and nil
means not to
use the ‘--dired’ option.
On MS-Windows and MS-DOS systems, and also on some remote systems,
Emacs emulates ls
. See ls in Lisp, for options and
peculiarities of this emulation.
To display the Dired buffer in another window, use C-x 4 d
(dired-other-window
). C-x 5 d
(dired-other-frame
) displays the Dired buffer in a separate
frame.
Typing q (quit-window
) buries the Dired buffer, and
deletes its window if the window was created just for that buffer.
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