bug#11822: 24.1; emacsclient terminal mode captures escape characters as text

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Cc: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@permabit.com>,  11822@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 08:09:55 -0400
> 
> >> But I know of no way to do just the pattern matching and
> >> existence test without fetching all the other data. The amount of wasted
> >> allocations are dependent on the content of my directory, of course.
> 
> > Did you look at that directory lately?  It should be cleaned from time
> > to time, to avoid having there auto-save files from years ago.
> 
> Arguable, Emacs should fins a way to do it automatically for you.

Do what? clean up that directory?  That's not the issue here.

The issue is that startup.el wants to know whether there are _any_
auto-save files, so that it could suggest recover-session.  But the
only way of doing that is call directory-files and look at the length
of the list it returns, which ends up consing a long list that's
thrown away.  I thought of proposing to expose to Lisp an fnmatch-like
function for this purpose, but it sounds like manually cleaning up
that directory is a much easier solution.