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

[David Masterson]

>>>>> Richard Stallman writes:

> 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.

What's wrong with having dired-do-shell-command ignore the * if it is
escaped with a backslash?

-- 
David Masterson                dmaster AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA