How to format shell commands run from Dired?

Question

I want to execute a formatted shell command on a file from within Dired. I am aware that I can use dired-do-shell-command to run a shell command on a selected file file by entering

! <command>

to run

<command> file

Ideally I want to run

! <command> file <additional-arguments>

In other words I want to be able to specify where in the command file appears. I tried running

! <command> {} <additional-arguments> 

and reading the doc for dired-do-shell-command, but neither of those gave me the solution to achieve this.

Answer 1

Simply add your parameters to the command prompt, separated by space, without any placeholder for filenames.
To construct commands like ls -l <file>, just enter ls -l.

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OR: the interface supports the placeholders * and ?.
Where ? means call command with one marked file only, in a loop;
and * means call with all marked files.
Read more at masteringemacs.org

Example: (ls would be your <command> and -l would be your <additional-arguments>).
You could enter ls * -l as command for example to run ls <files> -l once (with all marked files at once).
Or you could enter ls ? -l to run ls <file> -l for every single file.

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Edit: dired-do-shell-command help string:

Signature
(dired-do-shell-command COMMAND &optional ARG FILE-LIST)

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

If there is no *, but there is a ? in COMMAND, surrounded by whitespace, this runs COMMAND on each file individually with the file name substituted for ?.