Operating on Files

This section describes the basic Dired commands to operate on one file or several files. All of these commands are capital letters; all of them use the minibuffer, either to read an argument or to ask for confirmation, before they act. All use the following convention to decide which files to manipulate:

• If you give the command a numeric prefix argument n, it operates on the next n files, starting with the current file. (If n is negative, the command operates on the -n files preceding the current line.)
• Otherwise, if some files are marked with `*', the command operates on all those files.
• Otherwise, the command operates on the current file only.

Here are the file-manipulating commands that operate on files in this way. (Some other Dired commands, such as ! and the `%' commands, also use these conventions to decide which files to work on.)

C new RET

Copy the specified files (dired-do-copy). The argument new is the directory to copy into, or (if copying a single file) the new name. If dired-copy-preserve-time is non-nil, then copying with this command sets the modification time of the new file to be the same as that of the old file.

R new RET

Rename the specified files (dired-do-rename). The argument new is the directory to rename into, or (if renaming a single file) the new name. Dired automatically changes the visited file name of buffers associated with renamed files so that they refer to the new names.

H new RET

Make hard links to the specified files (dired-do-hardlink). The argument new is the directory to make the links in, or (if making just one link) the name to give the link.

S new RET

Make symbolic links to the specified files (dired-do-symlink). The argument new is the directory to make the links in, or (if making just one link) the name to give the link.

M modespec RET

Change the mode (also called "permission bits") of the specified files (dired-do-chmod). This uses the chmod program, so modespec can be any argument that chmod can handle.

G newgroup RET

Change the group of the specified files to newgroup (dired-do-chgrp).

O newowner RET

Change the owner of the specified files to newowner (dired-do-chown). (On most systems, only the superuser can do this.) The variable dired-chown-program specifies the name of the program to use to do the work (different systems put chown in different places).

P command RET

Print the specified files (dired-do-print). You must specify the command to print them with, but the minibuffer starts out with a suitable guess made using the variables lpr-command and lpr-switches (the same variables that lpr-file uses; see section Hardcopy Output).

Z

Compress or uncompress the specified files (dired-do-compress). If the file appears to be a compressed file, it is uncompressed; otherwise, it is compressed.

L

Load the specified Emacs Lisp files (dired-do-load). See section Libraries of Lisp Code for Emacs.

B

Byte compile the specified Emacs Lisp files (dired-do-byte-compile). See section `Byte Compilation' in The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual.

A regexp RET

Search all the specified files for the regular expression regexp (dired-do-search). This command is a variant of tags-search. The search stops at the first match it finds; use M-, to resume the search and find the next match. See section Searching and Replacing with Tags Tables.

Q from RET to RET

Perform query-replace-regexp on each of the specified files, replacing matches for from (a regular expression) with the string to (dired-do-query-replace). This command is a variant of tags-query-replace. If you exit the query replace loop, you can use M-, to resume the scan and replace more matches. See section Searching and Replacing with Tags Tables.

One special file-operation command is + (dired-create-directory). This command reads a directory name and creates the directory if it does not already exist.