Re: ! in Dired--what was the outcome?

[Juri Linkov]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
> What did we finally end up doing about the ! command in Dired
> and its handling of ? and *?

I see no other good solution than developing a special syntax to
express different needs for marked files used in shell commands.
Such a syntax would allow to specify file names, file directories,
file extensions etc. of all files or each file, and to evaluate
arbitrary s-expressions on file names.

Here is a short example what this would look like:

      \*f - all marked file names
      \?f - each marked file name
      \*d - all marked file names with directory
      \?d - each marked file name with directory
      \*x - all marked file names without extensions
      \?x - each marked file name without extension
      \*(s-expr) - s-expression evaluated on all files
      \?(s-expr) - s-expression evaluated on each file,
                   where rules for finding the end of s-expression are
                   the same as those used for \,(...) in query-replace

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/