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38.8 Shell Commands in Dired
The Dired command ! (dired-do-shell-command
) reads a
shell command string in the minibuffer and runs that shell command on
all the specified files. (X is a synonym for !.) You can
specify the files to operate on in the usual ways for Dired commands
(see section Operating on Files).
The working directory for the shell command is the top-level directory of the Dired buffer.
There are two ways of applying a shell command to multiple files:
-
If you use ‘*’ surrounded by whitespace in the shell command,
then the command runs just once, with the list of file names
substituted for the ‘*’. The order of file names is the order of
appearance in the Dired buffer.
Thus, ! tar cf foo.tar * <RET> runs
tar
on the entire list of file names, putting them into one tar file ‘foo.tar’.If you want to use ‘*’ as a shell wildcard with whitespace around it, write ‘*""’. In the shell, this is equivalent to ‘*’; but since the ‘*’ is not surrounded by whitespace, Dired does not treat it specially.
-
If the command string doesn't contain ‘*’ surrounded by
whitespace, then it runs once for each file. Normally the file
name is added at the end.
For example, ! uudecode <RET> runs
uudecode
on each file. - However, if the command string contains ‘?’ surrounded by whitespace, the current file name is substituted for ‘?’ (rather than added at the end). You can use ‘?’ this way more than once in the command, and the same file name replaces each occurrence.
To iterate over the file names in a more complicated fashion, use an explicit shell loop. For example, here is how to uuencode each file, making the output file name by appending ‘.uu’ to the input file name:
for file in * ; do uuencode "$file" "$file" >"$file".uu; done |
The ! command does not attempt to update the Dired buffer to show new or modified files, because it doesn't understand shell commands, and does not know what files the shell command changed. Use the g command to update the Dired buffer (see section Updating the Dired Buffer).
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