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emacsdired

emacs: How to Capture stdout from dired-do-shell-command?

In Emacs, is there a way to capture the stdout of dired-do-shell-command, say to the kill-ring?

Without knowing how, I end up going to the Messages buffer and getting the stdout manually from there.

Solution

  • Help for that command says that output goes to a buffer named *Shell Command Output*, assuming command has not &. If this is the case, this piece of code will do what you want:

    (defun do-shell-and-copy-to-kill-ring (command &optional arg file-list)
  (interactive
   (let ((files (dired-get-marked-files t current-prefix-arg)))
     (list
      (dired-read-shell-command "! on %s: " current-prefix-arg files)
      current-prefix-arg
      files)))
  (dired-do-shell-command command arg file-list)
  (with-current-buffer "*Shell Command Output*"
    (copy-region-as-kill (point-min) (point-max))))

    For async commands, you need to wait for them and look in *Async Shell Command* buffer.