Subject: bug#11912: 24.1; 'M' in Dired on a symlink does not refresh the display

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 09:52:38 -0700

On 8/26/21 7:07 AM, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> But if the dired buffer was created with ls -L, shouldn't M follow
> links?

Yes, in that case I suppose M should do so (and similarly for G, O, T).

This raises the issue of what to do with output like the following from 
GNU 'ls' when 'c' is a dangling symlink:

   $ ls -lL
   ls: cannot access 'c': No such file or directory
   total 0
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert eggert 0 Aug 26 09:46 b
   l????????? ? ?      ?      ?            ? c

However, these are rare cases; typically dired buffers are created 
without -L and we need to handle the typical cases better.