How to use Dired marked files as arguments to arbitrary Emacs Lisp functions?

Question

Dired lets me mark files and pass their names as arguments to arbitrary shell commands. I would like a way to supply the marked names as arguments to Emacs Lisp functions, either built-in or those I write myself.

Answer 1

Just use function dired-get-marked-files. It gives you a list of the marked file and directory names. And then just use funcall or apply to pass them to a function.

(You can also use w in Dired to copy the marked names, separated by spaces, to a (single) string on the kill-ring, which you can then yank to insert them as a group wherever you want.)