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So I'm trying to send a bunch of marked files to picard with dired's '&' (dired-do-async-shell-command). In the normal command line this opens one instance of picard with all the selected files:

picard 01\ -\ Snail\ -\ Underwater.ogg 02\ -\ Alain\ Johannes\ -\ Kaleidoscope.ogg

But in dired when I mark a few files and issue & picard I get two instances of picard.

How does one make dired send all mark files into one picard instance?

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2 Answers 2

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Please read the docstring of dired-do-shell-command, in particular this part:

If there is a ‘*’ in COMMAND, surrounded by whitespace, this runs
COMMAND just once with the entire file list substituted there.

This means you can run the command once just with & picard * RET.

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You can use w in Dired to copy the names of the marked files to the kill-ring, for later yanking (pasting).

Then, when you use a command such as & (dired-do-async-shell-command), you can yank that list of files into the shell command input where needed.

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  • thx @drew. but what if the application is a GUI app (like picard)? the CLI example was when launching it from shell. if i understand your suggestion, you recommend running a shell after & and from there launching picard FILE1 FILE2. thx! Z
    – zeltak
    Feb 14, 2017 at 15:06
  • Also: using this methodology you need to manually quote all spaces in each file name in the CLI right?
    – zeltak
    Feb 14, 2017 at 15:10
  • See Juri @link0ff's answer, which is a much better answer than mine. I knew there was a way to do that, but I'd forgotten what it was (*).
    – Drew
    Feb 14, 2017 at 23:23
  • For quoting spaces etc. see functionshell-quote-argument.
    – Drew
    Feb 14, 2017 at 23:25

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