I've heard great things about zmv in zsh, and would love to really learn to use it. However, I am still relatively unexperienced in zsh, and have some basic questions:
zmv in zsh (man zsh outputs "No manual entry for zmv")zmv natively allow for dry runs?zmv ?
The zmv manual is in the zshcontrib man page.
You can reach it directly with
LESS="$LESS +/^ *zmv *\\[" man zshcontrib
(or LESS="$LESS +/zmv" man zshcontrib which takes you a few lines further up because zmv is mentioned in the description of zcp). You can use man zshall instead of man zshcontrib if the zshall man page is available on your system.
If you use Info, you can reach it by running info zsh and typing i then entering zmv.
info --index-search=zmv zsh
The zsh guide has a fairly detailed section on zmv.
Searching for zmv on this stackexchange will turn up several usage examples of varying complexity.
You can perform a dry run with zmv -n (-n is a common way of requesting a dry run).
To benefit from zmv and friends, it helps to have code like the following in your ~/.zshrc:
autoload zmv
alias zmv='noglob zmv'
alias zcp='noglob zmv -C'
alias zln='noglob zmv -L'
alias zsy='noglob zmv -Ls'
