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 Operating on Files). There are two ways of applying a shell
command to multiple files:
- If you use
* in the shell command, then it 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 the command string doesn't contain
*, then it runs once
for each file, with the file name added at the end.
For example, ! uudecode <RET> runs uudecode on each
file.
What if you want to run the shell command once for each file, with the
file name inserted in the middle? You can use ? in the command
instead of *. The current file name is substituted for
?. You can use ? more than once. For instance, here is
how to uuencode each file, making the output file name by appending
.uu to the input file name:
uuencode ? ? > ?.uu
To use the file names in a more complicated fashion, you can use a
shell loop. For example, this shell command is another way to
uuencode each file:
for file in *; do uuencode "$file" "$file" >"$file".uu; done
The working directory for the shell command is the top-level directory
of the Dired buffer.
The ! command does not attempt to update the Dired buffer to show
new or modified files, because it doesn't really understand shell
commands, and does not know what files the shell command changed. Use
the g command to update the Dired buffer (see Dired Updating).
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