I recently discovered this nifty mode called “wdired” (writable dired). It gives “dired”, the simple directory management tool within Emacs, some editing functionalities.
In short you can “edit” contents in a directory. With it, you “edit” a directory like a file buffer. So instead of making changes one file at a time, this mode lets you leverage Emacs editing commands and batch up your changes in a buffer and then apply all of them when at one shot when you “save” the buffer.
This saves me a couple of minutes when I had to do some mass file manipulation last week. I was able to use query-string to selectively move large number of files and fix broken symbolic links.
Sweet…