DIRED 1 "17 August 1998" "Version 4.01" [section 3 of 13]

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DESCRIPTION

dired displays a long-form ls(1) directory listing on the screen of a display terminal and allows you to `edit' and peruse that listing by moving up and down, deleting, undeleting, editing, and displaying entries. The emacs(1) text editor provides a similar capability in an editor window. The shell TERM variable should be set to the standard string which the Berkeley termcap library uses for distinguishing terminals. With no argument, the connected directory is used. With only one argument, if that argument is a directory, it is used. With multiple arguments, (or a single non-directory argument) the argument(s) are interpreted as filenames. dired then types `Reading' and gets information about the various files/directories in your specification. This may take a short while (depending on how many you give it), so it types one period (.) after the word `Reading' for every 10 files it has gathered information about. With this, you can keep track of its progress. Interrupts, hangups, and the like are disabled since your terminal is put into a special mode that is only changed when you quit with the q command.

The format of the screen is as follows: each line represents a file (or directory), the name of which is right-most. From left the fields are: mode, link count, owner, size, write date and name. See ls(1) for a description of what each of these mean. You move up and down the column immediately left of the filename. The bottom half of the screen is used for displaying files via the type command. If there are too many files to all fit on one window, more windows are allocated. The f and b commands can be used for stepping forward and backward windows. The last screen line is used as an `echo' line for displaying error messages and reading arguments. It also displays the full directory name if `direding' a directory. When in split screen mode, the divider serves also as a `linear indicator' showing where the current window is relative to the entire list of files. The symbols `(' and `)' denote the window. Square brackets replace `(' and/or `)' when the window is the first and/or last window. A single `o' is used to represent the window when the window size is small compared to the total number of files.

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