You can pass a cons arg to `dired', to have it create a Dired buffer that shows only the files in the cdr of that cons (and with buffer name the car of the cons). Very useful (and hardly documented). But currently those file names must be literal names - no wildcards. For example, try this: (dired '("TTTT" "111.el" "b*.el")), assuming there is a file 111.el and some file(s) matching b*.el (but no file with name "b*.el", i.e. with a literal `*' in the name). An error is raised, because `dired' treats `b*.el' as a literal file name instead of globbing it. It would be nice to show a Dired buffer named "TTTT" listing file 111.el and all of the files whose names match b*.el. See also bug #7027. It reports only that the error msg shown when a wildcard is used this way is a bad msg: It should say "b*.el: doesn't exist or is inaccessible" (just as it does for other non-existent files), but instead it barfs: "(wrong-type-arg stringp nil)". But why shouldn't we allow wildcards in the file names of the cons, and not just in a directory name? That can be very handy. Attached are tiny patches for `dired.el' and `ls-lisp.el' that implement this feature for MS Windows (`ls-lisp.el' defines `insert-directory' on Windows). To implement this fully on non-Windows platforms, some changes would no doubt also be needed to the version of `insert-directory' in `files.el'. I cannot do that part, but I hope that someone else can and will.