Re: info inconsistency about "Shell Commands in Dired"

[Luc Teirlinck]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   What method is that?  Is it one of the two I described above,
   or something else?

The method I proposed was to expand if the ? (or *) was followed on
both sides by either whitespace _or_ ''.  So one could do:

mv ? .''?

or:

mv ? ?''.uu

to prepend . or append .uu

In the Emacs manual it is recommended to use the similar trick *"" to
include an isolated * _as a wildcard_.  The "" prevents expansion by
Emacs, because the * is not surrounded by whitespace.

My '' suggestion wanted to implement a similar trick for the opposite
problem, where one wants ? to be expanded without having to surround
it by whitespace.

But I am not so sure about my suggestion any more.  Some users might
currently be using ?'' or *'' instead of the suggested ?"" or *"" to
prevent expansion by Emacs and insert an isolated ? or * as a
wildcard.  That would no longer work after the patch I sent, and might
confuse users who do not carefully read the NEWS.

Sincerely,

Luc.