In the previous chapter, we learned about zle; zsh's module in charge of the command line. It's time we take advantage of our newly learned Globbing skills and get acquainted with zmv, a function that was created to make copying, moving, and linking files a breeze.

So, you ask, what's the deal with zmv? What's special about this built-in function in comparison to, say vanilla cp, is that zmv works its magic based on patterns. Further, as we'll see in this section, zmv is designed to be safe by default, which means it will ask you for a confirmation before taking on any kind of risky operation such as overwriting files.

Before we get started though, you should add the following to your .zshrc file, remembering to source it or restarting your terminal emulator of choice:

autoload zmv

This will make zsh load the function on startup, making it available to your session. You can now just type zmv and you'll be greeted with a fairly straightforward set of instructions. Basically,...