Hello, Here is my second attempt at solving this issue. To recap: dired-do-shell-command warns the user about non-isolated '*' and '?' characters since the function will not substitute them. It refers to these characters as "wildcards", which can be incorrect: they may be quoted or backslash-escaped, in which case the shell will not interpret them as wildcards. My main motivation to change this warning is that it trips my brain to have to answer "yes" ("yes, I want to use wildcards") when no wildcards are involved. I could not come up with a simple, self-sufficient rephrasing for the warning, so I decided to display the command itself as part of the warning prompt, highlighting the non-isolated characters. The first patch adjusts y-or-n-p so that it preserves the prompt's text properties. The second patch changes dired-do-shell-command's prompt.