Comments on: Working with multiple files in dired

By: mickey

mickey — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 12:33:30 +0000

A-hah! I didn’t know you could do that at all. Very good to know, Jürgen!

By: Iain

Iain — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 06:06:00 +0000

Even better, if you scroll to the bottom of http://real-world-systems.com/docs/awk.1.html you will see that awk can print with commas with %’d with the right locale.

By: Iain

Iain — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 06:03:41 +0000

Since Emacs is using ls’s output directly, you could filter that through awk to add commas. Googling “awk number comma” returned http://objectmix.com/awk/26500-need-function-add-commas-integers.html

By: Kenny

Kenny — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 03:31:56 +0000

exec-path is it.
The native tools on the mac are from BSD. So yeah, the first thing to do is install macports, then you can install GNU-anything-you-want. Then install http://emacsformacosx.com — works wonderfully. But it doesn’t appear to recognize my PATH in .bashrc and I don’t want to mess with /etc or .login or .whatever. Thus, exec-path is just the thing I’m looking for. Thanks so much!

By: mickey

mickey — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:27:42 +0000

I don't know much about macs, but you need to ensure your PATH environment variable points to the macports stuff, and that it picks it before the "native" version. Another approach is to add the coreutils path to the list variable exec-path.

By: Kenny

Kenny — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:27:33 +0000

I have GNU coreutils installed via macports, i.e., they’re not the default tools. Somehow I doubt that emacs is using them. How can I tell, and then if necessary, force emacs to use Coreutils? Thanks!

By: Jürgen Hötzel

Jürgen Hötzel — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:10:17 +0000

The “+” variant of the “exec” command executes “ls” on the whole file-list while the the default “;” variant executes “ls” for each found file.

By: mickey

mickey — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:11:09 +0000

Yes, and that is the default option. But as I mentioned in the article it is also a lot slower.

By: Jürgen Hötzel

Jürgen Hötzel — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:27:23 +0000

GNU Findutils can also exec a command on multiple files (no need for xargs):


(setq find-ls-option '("-exec ls -ld {} \\+" . "-ld"))

By: Sue D. Nymme

Sue D. Nymme — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 14:52:38 +0000

That doesn’t help much, I’m afraid. For one thing, I want exact file sizes, not “14k”. For another, it makes all the file sizes between 1 and 4 characters, which obfuscates the scale (imho).
I’d really prefer to see file sizes written out in full, but with commas. I don’t think ls has a flag to do that. I should look at the guts of dired to see how it lays out the results from ls.