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

[David Kastrup]

Reinhard Kotucha <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> "Johan" == Johan Vromans <address@hidden> writes:
>
>     > Likewise, {} could be made available to 'shell-command' as well,
>     > to make it easy to run arbitrary commands on the file associated
>     > with the current buffer. For example C-x C-s M-! cp {} {}.save
>     > RET before starting to make possibly hazardous changes...
>
> The example is quite special.  It allows to append an extension, but
> it disallows to remove one.
>
> What I do very often in bash is
>
>      for file in *.ps ; do
>        convert $file ${file%%ps}pdf
>      done
>
> Maybe your syntax can be extended, for instance like this:
>
>       convert {} {/ps$//}pdf
> or 
>       convert {} {/ps$/pdf/}
>
> Using regexps is much more powerful than the substring approach in
> bash anyway.

No.  If you need a shell, use a shell.  Like

i={};convert $i ${i%%ps}pdf

There is no sense in converting Emacs into a shell in a dozen of
different ways.  If we wanted to add in-built intelligence, the way to
do that would be to use eshell for it.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum