Re: dired-do-shell-command: cannot escape the *

[Richard Stallman]

There is no way to escape the * or ? in dired-do-shell-command.
I cannot think of a good interface for it.

In principle, I'd like to provide a way, if a good and convenient
interface can be found.  However, I'd rather leave the feature missing
than implement it with an inconvenient or ugly interface.  This is a
somewhat obscure thing to want to do, and there are many ways to run a
shell script using a list of files.  It is not vital to be able to do
it through ! in Dired.

One idea that occurs to me is to replace only the first *
with the list of files.  That way, you could use * later on
for other purposes.  That would solve the problem, but I am not
sure it is really a good idea.