bug#28569: 25.2; dired-sort-toggle-or-edit vs. quote marks

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson
>       <jidanni@jidanni.org>
> Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2017 19:18:29 +0800
> 
> User sees arguments with embedded spaces on
> (info "(coreutils) Formatting file timestamps")
> and tries one.
> 
> He types C-u s which runs the command dired-sort-toggle-or-edit
> and at the prompt gives:
> 
> ls switches (must contain -l): -olt --time-style='+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%N %z'
> 
> Alas, it turns out if the string contains any kind of quote mark, the
> entire dired screen will go blank, with the error
> 
> insert-directory: Listing directory failed but ‘access-file’ worked

Did you read the doc string of dired-listing-switches?  It explains
how to specify long options that include whitespace.  (Hint: Dired is
not a shell, so shell-style quoting is not necessarily appropriate.)

Oh, I see that Emacs 25.2 doesn't yet have that bit in the doc string.
Well, but what will become Emacs 26.1 does.  Here's that text, for
your convenience:

  Options that include embedded whitespace must be quoted
  like this: \"--option=value with spaces\"; you can use
  ‘combine-and-quote-strings’ to produce the correct quoting of
  each option.