! in Dired--what was the outcome?

[Jose E. Marchesi]

    What did we finally end up doing about the ! command in Dired
    and its handling of ? and *?
    

I would suggest to back to the old handling: subst all appearances of
'?'  and '*' unless escaped with a backslash character '\'.

The new handling (a space or end of line must follow both characters
in order to be handled as special) make very difficult to construct
another file name from the selected one.

Consider the following command:

     !cmd ? ?.added_extension

It is not trivial to concatenate strings with sh. It is much more
comfortable to escape the characters in the case we want to send them
literally to the shell.

Another choice would be to change the substituted characters. Both '?'
and '*' are heavily used on the shell command. But such a radical
change could confuse many users.

Just my two euro-cents.


-- 
José E. Marchesi 

<address@hidden>         http://www.gnu.org     GNU No es Unix!
<address@hidden>      http://es.gnu.org      GNU España

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