file management - How do I stop emacs dired mode from opening so many buffers?

Question

When I use dired mode to browse around and find a file I want to open in Emacs, dired opens a new buffer for each directory I visit when looking for the file each time I select a directory with Enter, which means I can end up with a lot of buffers I don't want:

. * newer                    0  Fundamental       c:/work/stackoverflow/batch/mydir/newer
 %  mydir                  302  Dired by name     c:/work/stackoverflow/batch/mydir/
 %  batch                  616  Dired by name     c:/work/stackoverflow/batch/
 %  stackoverflow         1017  Dired by name     c:/work/stackoverflow/
 %  work                  2545  Dired by name     c:/work/
  * *scratch*              190  Lisp Interaction
 %  *Completions*          162  Completion List
  * *Messages*            2163  Fundamental

Is there any way to make dired re-use a single buffer? I tried M-x customize-group for group dired but didn't see anything promising in there.

Alternatively, does anyone have a macro to close all open dired buffers?

Answer 1

Use a (dired-find-alternate-file) instead of Enter

Also, see this page:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredReuseDirectoryBuffer