Finally got around to try out rmc.el. A brief recap of the issue: dired-do-shell-command looks out for any non-isolated metacharacters[1], and prompts the user when it finds some. The problem is that the prompt is downright misleading under some circumstances. E.g. after marking some files in a Dired buffer: ! sed 's/?/!/g' RET => Confirm--do you mean to use `?' as a wildcard? The answer a user must input to proceed is "yes", despite '?' not being a wildcard in this situation; the answer some users may give intuitively is "no" (or, in my case, "whaaa?"). This patch series initially tried to shove the command in the prompt, highlight the non-isolated characters, and re-phrase the prompt to be more accurate (i.e. not talk about wildcards). It went through a several iterations for a few reasons[2]; most recently Michael suggested using read-multiple-choice [bug#35564#136]; I looked at how nsm.el uses it, saw that is was good, and got distracted for two months. Here is the new series: