zmv for zsh: Dry runs and man pages

Question

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:

• Is there is a man page for zmv in zsh (man zsh outputs "No manual entry for zmv")
• Does zmv natively allow for dry runs?
• If the answer to the above is no, how would you test or do a dry run with zmv ?

Answer 1

The zmv manual is in the zshcontrib man page.

The zsh guide has a fairly detailed section on zmv. Searching for zmv on this site 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 zmz='noglob zmv'
alias zcp='noglob zmv -C'
alias zln='noglob zmv -L'
alias zsy='noglob zmv -Ls'