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

[David Kastrup]

Luc Teirlinck <address@hidden> writes:

> Juri Linkov wrote:
>
>    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
>
> I guess you also would need a rule that if Emacs sees \\* or \\? it
> actually passes \* or \? to the shell to allow _literal_ *'s and ?'s
> in file names.  Then all of that would have to be documented in the
> Emacs manual.
>
> Maybe I should mention a possible simpler solution, proposed in
> private email by Johan Vromans to use {} instead of ?, in analogy with
> the -exec argument of find(1).
>
> mv {} .{}.uu

I think that is a good proposal.  The normal use does not really seem
to warrant all that complexity.  The disadvantage is that {} is not
necessarily easy to type on non-American keyboards, but I think that
people typing shell commands and using Emacs for editing (many
languages use braces, even TeX) are likely used to having to type
those characters.

> I do not know whether we then also should use () or [] or such
> instead of * for consistency.  The idea is to get rid of confusion
> with shell wildcards.

() and [] don't look so hot.  Perhaps {*} ?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum