On my old blog I wrote about calling FTP from Dired under Emacs and Xah Lee has written several posts about Dired capabilities and how to use them (search for dired at the above link). Now Bart Lantz over at Denver Droid has a nice post on Cool Things to do in Emacs’ Dired Mode. Many of these are the usual things such as deleting or renaming files but he also writes about less well known commands such as 【~】 to mark all backup files for deletion and the 【O】, 【M】, and 【G】 commands to change a file’s owner, mode, and group. He also writes about using dired to clean up your Downloads directory.
There are other ideas in the comments such as using the 【Q】 command to do a regexp search and replace on the marked files or using 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+q】 to enable editing in the dired buffer.
This is a great post and well worth spending a few minutes on. There’s a lot of capability in dired and learning about some of it can help your work flow a lot.