Subject: Re: bug#60819: 28.2; `ls-lisp.el' regression introduced in Emacs 26

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2023 10:55:49 +0200

> From: Drew Adams <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2023 22:28:36 +0000
> 
> In all Emacs releases prior to Emacs 26, if you use command `dired' with
> an input directory name that has wildcards and ends with a slash,
> e.g. c:/foo/bar/*b*/, the command simply ignores the trailing slash and
> correctly gives you a listing of all files and dirs in c:/foo/bar/ whose
> names contain a b character.
> 
> Starting with Emacs 26, such input raises an error.  IMO it should not.
> 
> Other than that, the error message is anyway inappropriate: "No files
> matching regexp".

I fixed the message to say "No files matching wildcard" instead.

> In general, the character / in a glob pattern cannot be matched by a
> wildcard.  E.g., Wikipedia says "Normally, the path separator character
> (/ on Linux/Unix, MacOS, etc. or \ on Windows) will never be matched."
> and Linux man page glob(7) says "A '/' in a pathname cannot be matched
> by a '?' or '*' wildcard, or by a range like "[.-0]"."

This is incorrect.  A wildcard like "*b*/" should expand to the list
of directories whose names match "*b*", whereas "*b*" should expand to
the list of files _and_ directories with matching names.  This is how
Dired behaves on Posix platforms (where such an expansion is done by
the 'ls' program), and we want a similar behavior with ls-lisp.

So I've now made ls-lisp on the emacs-29 branch behave like that: a
wildcard that ends in a slash is expanded to the list of matching
directories.  And with that, I'm closing this bug.