AB. Dired, the Directory Editor

Dired makes an Emacs buffer containing a listing of a directory, and optionally some of its subdirectories as well. You can use the normal Emacs commands to move around in this buffer, and special Dired commands to operate on the files listed.

The Dired buffer is "read-only," and inserting text in it is not useful, so ordinary printing characters such as d and x are used for special Dired commands. Some Dired commands mark or flag the current file (that is, the file on the current line); other commands operate on the marked files or on the flagged files.

The Dired-X package provides various extra features for Dired mode. See section `Top' in Dired Extra Version 2 User's Manual.

AB.1 Entering Dired		How to invoke Dired.
AB.2 Navigation in the Dired Buffer		Special motion commands in the Dired buffer.
AB.3 Deleting Files with Dired		Deleting files with Dired.
AB.4 Flagging Many Files at Once		Flagging files based on their names.
AB.5 Visiting Files in Dired		Other file operations through Dired.
AB.6 Dired Marks vs. Flags		Flagging for deletion vs marking.
AB.7 Operating on Files		How to copy, rename, print, compress, etc. either one file or several files.
AB.8 Shell Commands in Dired		Running a shell command on the marked files.
AB.9 Transforming File Names in Dired		Using patterns to rename multiple files.
AB.10 File Comparison with Dired		Running `diff' by way of Dired.
AB.11 Subdirectories in Dired		Adding subdirectories to the Dired buffer.
AB.12 Moving Over Subdirectories		Moving across subdirectories, and up and down.
AB.13 Hiding Subdirectories		Making subdirectories visible or invisible.
AB.14 Updating the Dired Buffer		Discarding lines for files of no interest.
AB.15 Dired and find		Using `find' to choose the files for Dired.