GNU Emacs Manual. Node: Shell Commands in Dired

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26.8: Shell Commands in Dired

The dired command ! (dired-do-shell-command) reads a shell command string in the minibuffer and runs that shell command on all the specified files. You can specify the files to operate on in the usual ways for Dired commands (see Operating on Files). There are two ways of applying a shell command to multiple files:

What if you want to run the shell command once for each file but with the file name inserted in the middle? Or if you want to use the file names in a more complicated fashion? Use a shell loop. For example, this shell command would run uuencode on each of the specified files, writing the output into a corresponding `.uu' file:

for file in *; do uuencode $file $file >$file.uu; done

The working directory for the shell command is the top-level directory of the Dired buffer.

The ! command does not attempt to update the Dired buffer to show new or modified files, because it doesn't really understand shell commands, and does not know what files the shell command changed. Use the g command to update the Dired buffer (see Dired Updating).

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