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

[David Masterson]

>>>>> Richard Stallman writes:

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

> Then people have to wonder about what to do if they want to put
> backslash-* into the shell command.  In other words, this isn't as
> simple in practice as it sounds.

Hmmm.  I suppose you could escape the backslash?  

That is, dired-do-shell-command [and others?] would always assume that
a backslash is escaping the next character (ie. removing special
meaning from it).  If the next character is a backslash, then a single
backslash is passed.  If the next character is a '*', then the '*' is
passed (and, so, '\\\*' would become '\*').  This is a uniform
approach that everyone should understand, but I'm not sure if it looks
right...  :-\

The other approach is to change dired-do-shell-command to assume that
'\*' is the special character that gets filled in with the marked
filenames.  I guess that this would also have to assume the previous
paragraph to allow people to type '\\*' and have '\*' passed to the
shell command.  This seems to be a less uniform approach, though, so I
like it less... :-\

The basic problem is that a non-special character has been given
special significance for dired-do-shell-command, but there are (many)
times you want to use that character without its special significance.
I don't suppose you could type '^Q*' (ie. the Emacs escape mechanism)
to dired-do-shell-command and have it recognize that as either "place
all files here" or "pass a * to the shell" (whichever seems more
appropriate)?

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