mdired provides different SIMD-style commands to operate on marked Dired items ((emacs)Marks vs Flags).
Please be advised: mdired can make irreversible changes to the file system if no prior checkpoint (typically via a source code management or backup tool) is available. Exercise caution.
Run Elisp COMMAND on marked Dired items.
For all marked Dired items, call find-file and then run COMMAND on each item in sequential fashion. After this command has been run, any buffers that are modified will remain open and unsaved.
COMMAND may be an interactive command or a named keyboard macro.
Note: mdired-do-command does not check if a marked Dired item is a file or directory. The marked Dired item should handle COMMAND gracefully.
How errors are handled by this command is controlled by the variable mdired-ignore-errors.
Copy current Dired item to marked Dired items with overwrite policy ARG.
For all marked Dired items, copy the current Dired item to it. If the marked item is a directory, the current item is copied into it. If the marked item is a file, the current Dired item will write over it per the policy determined via the command prefix ARG.
If no command prefix (C-u) is set, then the user will be prompted to select an overwrite policy as described in copy-file. The options provided are:
If the command prefix (C-u) is set, then marked files will be overwritten without prompt.
How errors are handled by this command is controlled by the variable mdired-ignore-errors.
Run compile on marked Dired directories.
For all marked directories, run compile on each directory, with output placed in a uniquely named buffer of the form
“compilation - %s”
where “%s” is the name of the marked directory.
mdired-compile pre-checks that all marked items are directories and will not execute if not true.
Refer to (emacs)Compilation for detail on compile.
Byte recompile marked Elisp files or directories.
For all marked items, run either byte-recompile-directory if the item is a directory, or byte-recompile-file if the item is an Elisp file.