Re: info inconsistency about "Shell Commands in Dired"

[Masatake YAMATO <jet@gyve.org>]

> Masatake YAMATO wrote:
> 
>    In the section "Shell Commands in Dired" of Emacs Info, 
>    I found following lines:
> 
>       * If the command string contains `?' surrounded by whitespace, the
> 	current file name is substituted for `?'.  You can use `?' this
> 	way more than once in the command, and each occurrence is
> 	replaced.  For instance, here is how to uuencode each file, making
> 	the output file name by appending `.uu' to the input file name:
> 
> 	     uuencode ? ? > ?.uu
> 
>    ?.uu is surrounded by whitespace. So above command line generated an
>    unexpected file.
> 
> You mean that the third ? is _not_ surrounded by whitespace?  I indeed
> believe that the example is wrong.  The third ? is not substituted
> and the output goes to a file named ?.uu.

What you believe is what I meant. The example is wrong. One of the
solution is to remove the example from the texi. However, dired users
may be happy if the users can do:
> 	     uuencode ? ? > ?.uu
Yesterday I tried "tar cvf ?.tar ?"; and I got ?.tar file.

How do you think accepting `-' and `.' in addition to the whitespace?
I have considered more generic extension, however I have got no idea.

Masatake YAMATO