Re: Mechaincal question Show filename of # marked

[Colin Walters <walters@cis.ohio-state.edu>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Yes... It gives a nice list like this:
> 
> ("/home/reader/Mail/prinb/13456" "/home/reader/Mail/prinb/13455" \
> "/home/reader/Mail/prinb/13454" "/home/reader/Mail/prinb/13453")
> 
> Cool.
> 
> How can I feed that list to a shell script?  Can I pipe it to a
> shell script some how?

There are a few list processing functions you can use.  In Emacs 20,
the traditional way to do this is with `mapcar', and an anonymous
function (lambda).

So for example, if you want to run a shell command foo on those files:

(mapcar (lambda (x) (shell-command-to-string (concat "foo " x)))
        thelist)

where `thelist' is a variable in which you have stored the above list.

If you use the CL macro `dolist', you can say:

(require 'cl)
(dolist (x thelist)
  (shell-command-to-string (concat "foo " x)))

There are some differences between the above two forms, but those
differences aren't really important for this task.

`dolist' will be builtin to Emacs 21, too.