Re: Substitute ? in dired without surrounding whitespace

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>     that gets translated to the dired's file name placeholder as
>
> 	display 'jpeg:?'
>
>     but dired doesn't substitute it with a file name because ? is not
>     surrounded by whitespace.  This dired's limitation applies also
>     to manually typing such a command line, not only by selecting it
>     from a list of mailcap commands.
>
>     Does there exist a way to tell dired to substitute a file name placeholder
>     without surrounding whitespace?
>
> One solution is to set a shell variable.  Does this work?
>
>   for file in * ; do display "jpeg:$file"; done

Yes, this works.  But this command line is to complicated and
inconvenient to edit for users.  And I'm not sure is it sufficiently
portable to different systems.

The goal was to run the command returned by mailcap in the format:

    display 'jpeg:%s'

where "%s" is intended to be replaced by the file name in the programs
that read mailcap entries.

So perhaps we could change Dired to accept this format and to replace %s
(regardless of surrounding whitespace) with the file name.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/