Dired (for Directory Editor) is a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

for editing file system directories. It typically runs inside the

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to c ...

as a specialized mode, though standalone versions have been written. Dired was the

file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage computer files, files and folder (computing), folders. The most common Computer file#Operations, operations performed on files or groups of files incl ...

, or visual editor of file system information. The first version of Dired was written as a stand-alone program independently in 1972 by Dave Lebling at Project MAC, and circa 1974 by Stan Kugell at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). It was incorporated into

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a text editor and suite of free software tools. Its development began in 1984 by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU ...

from the earliest versions, and re-implemented in C and C++ on other operating systems. When run in Emacs, dired displays an ls-like file listing in an Emacs buffer. The list can be navigated using standard navigation commands. Several

Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp is a Lisp dialect made for Emacs. It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter. Emacs Lisp code is used to modify, extend and customi ...

scripts have been developed to extend Dired in Emacs. In combination with Tramp it is able to access remote file systems for editing files by means of SSH,

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

telnet Telnet (sometimes stylized TELNET) is a client-server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main ...

and many other protocols, as well as the capability of accessing local files as another user in the same session. There are also functions that make it possible to rename multiple files via Emacs search and replace capabilities or apply

regular expressions A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), sometimes referred to as rational expression, is a sequence of character (computing), characters that specifies a pattern matching, match pattern in string (computer science), text. Usually ...

for marking (selecting) multiple files. Once marked, files can be operated on in various ways from deleting, to renaming, to executing an external shell command or elisp function on them. By means of the Lisp package dired-x it is also possible to handle existing ls-like directory listings in a virtual Dired mode. These can also be saved again, often using the filename extension dired.

References

External links

Dired manual
at GNU.org
Entry
at the

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

; focuses mostly on the many scripts and tweaks that can modify the default Dired's behavior. Free file managers Emacs modes Unix file system-related software {{Unix-stub