mc(1)
NAME
mc - Visual shell for Unix-like systems.
USAGE
mc [-abcCdfhPstuUVx?] [-l log] [dir1 [dir2]] [-v file]
DESCRIPTION
The Midnight Commander is a directory browser/file manager
for Unix-like operating systems.
OPTIONS
-a Disables the usage of graphic characters for line
drawing.
-b Forces black and white display.
-c Force color mode, please check the section Colors
for more information.
-C arg Used to specify a different color set in the com-
mand line. The format of arg is documented in the
Colors section.
-d Disables mouse support.
-f Displays the compiled-in search paths for Midnight
Commander files.
-k Reset softkeys to their default from the term-
cap/terminfo database. Only useful on HP terminals
when the function keys don't work.
-l file
Save the ftpfs dialog with the server in file.
-P At program end, the Midnight Commander will print
the last working directory; this, along with the
shell function below, will allow you to browse
through your directories and automatically move to
the last directory you were in (thanks to Torben
Fjerdingstad and Sergey for contributing this func-
tion and the code which implements this option).
bash and zsh users:
mc ()
{
MC=/tmp/mc$$-"$RANDOM"
/usr/bin/mc -P "$@" > "$MC"
cd "`cat $MC`"
rm "$MC"
unset MC;
}
tcsh users:
alias mc 'setenv MC `/usr/bin/mc -P *`; cd $MC; unsetenv MC'
I know the bash function could be shorter for zsh and
bash but the
backquotes on bash won't accept your suspension the
program with C-z.
-s Turns on the slow terminal mode, in this mode the
program will not draw expensive line drawing char-
acters and will toggle verbose mode off.
-t Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and
terminfo: it makes the Midnight Commander use the
value of the TERMCAP variable for the terminal
information instead of the information on the sys-
tem wide terminal database
-u Disables the use of a concurrent shell (only makes
sense if the Midnight Commander has been built with
concurrent shell support).
-U Enables the use of the concurrent shell support
(only makes sense if the Midnight Commander was
built with the subshell support set as an optional
feature).
-v file
Enters the internal viewer to view the file speci-
fied.
-V Displays the version of the program.
-x Forces xterm mode. Used when running on xterm-
capable terminals (two screen modes, and able to
send mouse escape sequences).
If specified, the first path name is the directory to show
in the selected panel; the second path name is the direc-
tory to be shown in the other panel.
Overview
The screen of the Midnight Commander is divided into four
parts. Almost all of the screen space is taken up by two
directory panels. By default, the second bottommost line
of the screen is the shell command line, and the bottom
line shows the function key labels. The topmost line is
the menu bar line. The menu bar line may not be visible,
but appears if you click the topmost line with the mouse
or press the F9 key.
The Midnight Commander provides a view of two directories
at the same time. One of the panels is the current panel
(a selection bar is in the current panel). Almost all
operations take place on the current panel. Some file
operations like Rename and Copy by default use the direc-
tory of the unselected panel as a destination (don't
worry, they always ask you for confirmation first). For
more information, see the sections on the Directory Pan-
els, the Left and Right Menus and the File Menu.
You can execute system commands from the Midnight Comman-
der by simply typing them. Everything you type will appear
on the shell command line, and when you press Enter the
Midnight Commander will execute the command line you
typed; read the Shell Command Line and Input Line Keys
sections to learn more about the command line.
Mouse Support
The Midnight Commander comes with mouse support. It is
activated whenever you are running on an xterm(1) terminal
(it even works if you take a telnet or rlogin connection
to another machine from the xterm) or if you are running
on a Linux console and have the gpm mouse server running.
When you left click on a file in the directory panels,
that file is selected; if you click with the right button,
the file is marked (or unmarked, depending on the previous
state).
Double-clicking on a file will try to execute the command
if it is an executable program; and if the extension file
has a program specified for the file's extension, the
specified program is executed.
Also, it is possible to execute the commands assigned to
the function key labels by clicking on them.
If a mouse button is clicked on the top frame line of the
directory panel, it is scrolled one pageful backward. Cor-
respondingly, a click on the bottom frame line will cause
a scroll of one pageful forward. This frame line method
works also in the Help Viewer and the Directory Tree.
The default auto repeat rate for the mouse buttons is 400
milliseconds. This may be changed to other values by edit-
ing the ~/.mc/ini file and changing the mouse_repeat_rate
parameter.
If you are running the Commander with the mouse support,
you can bypass the Commander and get the default mouse
behavior (cutting and pasting text) by holding down the
Shift key.
Keys
Some commands in the Midnight Commander involve the use of
the Control (sometimes labeled CTRL or CTL) and the Meta
(sometimes labeled ALT or even Compose) keys. In this man-
ual we will use the following abbreviations:
C-<chr> means hold the Control key while typing the char-
acter <chr>. Thus C-f would be: hold the Control key and
type f.
M-<chr> means hold the Meta or Alt key down while typing
<chr>. If there is no Meta or Alt key, type ESC, release
it, then type the character <chr>.
All input lines in the Midnight Commander use an approxi-
mation to the GNU Emacs editor's key bindings.
There are many sections which tell about the keys. The
following are the most important.
The File Menu section documents the keyboard shortcuts for
the commands appearing in the File menu. This section
includes the function keys. Most of these commands perform
some action, usually on the selected file or the tagged
files.
The Directory Panels section documents the keys which
select a file or tag files as a target for a later action
(the action is usually one from the file menu).
The Shell Command Line section list the keys which are
used for entering and editing command lines. Most of these
copy file names and such from the directory panels to the
command line (to avoid excessive typing) or access the
command line history.
Input Line Keys are used for editing input lines. This
means both the command line and the input lines in the
query dialogs.
Miscellaneous Keys
Here are some keys which don't fall into any of the other
categories:
Enter. If there is some text in the command line (the one
at the bottom of the panels), then that command is exe-
cuted. If there is no text in the command line then if the
selection bar is over a directory the Midnight Commander
does a chdir(2) to the selected directory and reloads the
information on the panel; if the selection is an exe-
cutable file then it is executed. Finally, if the exten-
sion of the selected file name matches one of the exten-
sions in the extensions file then the corresponding
command is executed.
C-l. Repaint all the information in the Midnight Comman-
der.
C-x c. Run the Chmod command on a file or on the tagged
files.
C-x o. Run the Chown command on the current file or on
the tagged files.
C-x l. Run the link command.
C-x s. Run the symbolic link command.
C-x i. Set the other panel display mode to information.
C-x q. Set the other panel display mode to quick view.
C-x !. Execute the External panelize command.
C-x h Run the add directory to hotlist command.
M-!, Executes the Filtered view command, described in the
view command.
M-?, Executes the Find file command.
M-c, Pops up the quick cd dialog.
C-o, When the program is being run in the Linux or SCO
console or under an xterm, it will show you the output of
the previous command. When ran on the Linux console, the
Midnight Commander uses an external program (cons.saver)
to handle saving and restoring of information on the
screen.
When the subshell support is compiled in, you can type C-o
at any time and you will be taken back to the Midnight
Commander main screen, to return to your application just
type C-o. If you have an application suspended by using
this trick, you won't be able to execute other programs
from the Midnight Commander until you terminate the sus-
pended application.
Directory Panels
This section lists the keys which operate on the directory
panels. If you want to know how to change the appearance
of the panels take a look at the section on Left and Right
Menus.
Tab, C-i. Change the current panel. The old other panel
becomes the new current panel and the old current panel
becomes the new other panel. The selection bar moves from
the old current panel to the new current panel.
Insert, C-t. To tag files you may use the Insert key (the
kich1 terminfo sequence) or the C-t (Control-t) sequence.
To untag files, just retag a tagged file.
M-g, M-h (or M-r), M-j. Used to select the top file in a
panel, the middle file and the bottom one, respectively.
C-s, M-s. Start a filename search in the directory list-
ing. When the search is active the keypresses will be
added to the search string instead of the command line. If
the Show mini-status option is enabled the search string
is shown on the mini-status line. When typing, the selec-
tion bar will move to the next file starting with the
typed letters. The backspace or DEL keys can be used to
correct typing mistakes. If C-s is pressed again, the next
match is searched for.
M-t Toggle the current display listing to show the next
display listing mode. With this it is possible to quickly
switch from long listing to regular listing and the user
defined listing mode.
C-\ (control-backslash). Show the directory hotlist and
change to the selected directory.
+ (plus). This is used to select (tag) a group of files.
The Midnight Commander will prompt for a regular expres-
sion describing the group. When Shell Patterns are
enabled, the regular expression is much like the regular
expressions in the shell (* standing for zero or more
characters and ? standing for one character). If Shell
Patterns is off, then the tagging of files is done with
normal regular expressions (see ed (1)).
If the expression starts or ends with a slash (/), then it
will select directories instead of files.
\ (backslash). Use the "\" key to unselect a group of
files. This is the opposite of the Plus key.
up-key, C-p. Move the selection bar to the previous entry
in the panel.
down-key, C-n. Move the selection bar to the next entry
in the panel.
home, a1, M-<<. Move the selection bar to the first entry
in the panel.
end, c1, M->>. Move the selection bar to the last entry in
the panel.
next-page, C-v. Move the selection bar one page down.
prev-page, M-v. Move the selection bar one page up.
M-o, If the other panel is a listing panel and you are
standing on a directory in the current panel, then the
other panel contents are set to the contents of the cur-
rently selected directory (like Emacs' dired C-o key) oth-
erwise the other panel contents are set to the parent dir
of the current dir.
C-PageUp, C-PageDown Only when ran on the Linux console:
does a chdir to ".." and to the currently selected direc-
tory respectively.
Shell Command Line
This section lists keys which are useful to avoid exces-
sive typing when entering shell commands.
M-Enter. Copy the currently selected file name to the
command line.
C-Enter. Same a M-Enter, this one only works on the Linux
console.
M-Tab. Does the filename, command, variable, username and
hostname completion for you.
C-x t, C-x C-t. Copy the tagged files (or if there are no
tagged files, the selected file) of the current panel (C-x
t) or of the other panel (C-x C-t) to the command line.
C-x p, C-x C-p. The first key sequence copies the current
path name to the command line, and the second one copies
the unselected panel's path name to the command line.
C-q. The quote command can be used to insert characters
that are otherwise interpreted by the Midnight Commander
(like the '+' symbol)
M-p, M-n. Use these keys to browse through the command
history. M-p takes you to the last entry, M-n takes you to
the next one.
M-h. Displays the history for the current input line.
General Movement Keys
The help viewer, the file viewer and the directory tree
use common code to handle moving. Therefore they accept
exactly the same keys. Each of them also accepts some keys
of its own.
Other parts of the Midnight Commander use some of the same
movement keys, so this section may be of use for those
parts too.
Up, C-p. Moves one line backward.
Down, C-n. Moves one line forward.
Prev Page, Page Up, M-v. Moves one pageful backward.
Next Page, Page Down, C-v. Moves one pageful forward.
Home, A1. Moves to the beginning.
End, C1. Move to the end.
The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following
keys in addition the to ones mentioned above:
b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete. Moves one pageful back-
ward.
Space bar. Moves one pageful forward.
u, d. Moves one half of a page backward or forward.
g, G. Moves to the beginning or to the end.
Input Line Keys
The input lines (they are used for the command line and
for the query dialogs in the program) accept these keys:
C-a puts the cursor at the beginning of line.
C-e puts the cursor at the end of the line.
C-b, move-left move the cursor one position left.
C-f, move-right move the cursor one position right.
M-f moves one word forward.
M-b moves one word backward.
C-h, backspace delete the previous character.
C-d, Delete delete the character in the point (over the
cursor).
C-@ sets the mark for cutting.
C-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a
kill buffer and removes the text from the input line.
M-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a
kill buffer.
C-y yanks back the contents of the kill buffer.
C-k kills the text from the cursor to the end of the line.
M-p, M-n Use these keys to browse through the command his-
tory. M-p takes you to the last entry, M-n takes you to
the next one.
M-C-h, M-Backspace delete one word backward.
M-Tab does the filename, command, variable, username and
hostname completion for you.
Menu Bar
The menu bar pops up when you press F9 or click the mouse
on the top row of the screen. The menu bar has five menus:
"Left", "File", "Command", "Options" and "Right".
The Left and Right Menus allow you to modify the appear-
ance of the left and right directory panels.
The File Menu lists the actions you can perform on the
currently selected file or the tagged files.
The Command Menu lists the actions which are more general
and bear no relation to the currently selected file or the
tagged files.
Left and Right Menus
The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from
the Left and Right menus.
Listing Mode...
The listing mode view is used to display a listing of
files, there are four different listing modes available:
Full, Brief, Long, and User. The full directory view
shows the file name, the size of the file and the modifi-
cation time.
The brief view shows only the file name and it has two
columns (therefore showing twice as many files as other
views). The long view is similar to the output of ls -l
command. The long view takes the whole screen width.
If you choose the "User" display format, then you have to
specify the display format.
The user display format must start with a panel size spec-
ifier. This may be "half" or "full", and they specify a
half screen panel and a full screen panel respectively.
After the panel size, you may specify the two columns mode
on the panel, this is done by adding the number "2" to the
user format string.
After this you add the name of the fields with an optional
size specifier. This are the available fields you may
display:
name, displays the file name.
size, displays the file size.
bsize, is an alternative form of the <bf/size/ format. It
displays the size of the files and for directories it just
shows SUB-DIR or UP--DIR.
type, displays a one character field type. This character
is a superset of what is displayed by ls with the -F flag.
An asterisk for executable files, a slash for directories,
an at-sign for links, an equal sign for sockets, a hyphen
for character devices, a plus sign for block devices, a
pipe for fifos, a tilde for symbolic links to directories
and an exclamation mark for stalled symlinks (links that
point nowhere).
mtime, file's last modification time.
atime, file's last access time.
ctime, file's creation time.
perm, a string representing the current permission bits of
the file.
mode, an octal value with the current permission bits of
the file.
nlink, the number of links to the file. ngid, the GID
(numeric).
nuid, the UID (numeric).
owner, the owner of the file.
group, the group of the file.
inode, the inode of the file.
Also you may use these field names for arranging the dis-
play:
space, a space in the display format.
mark, An asterisk if the file is tagged, a space if it's
not.
|, This character is used to add a vertical line to the
display format.
To force one field to a fixed size (a size specifier), you
just add a ':' and then the number of characters you want
the field to have, if the number is followed by the symbol
'+', then the size specifies the minimum field size, if
the program finds out that there is more space on the
screen, it will then expand this field.
For example, the Full display corresponds to this format:
half type,name,|,size,|,mtime
And the Long display corresponds to this format:
full
perm,space,nlink,space,owner,space,group,space,size,space,
mtime,space,name
This is a nice user display format:
half name,|,size:7,|,type,mode:3
Panels may also be set to the following modes:
Info The info view display information related to the
currently selected file and if possible information
about the current file system.
Tree The tree view is quite similar to the directory
tree feature. See the section about it for more
information.
Quick View
In this mode, the panel will switch to a reduced
viewer that displays the contents of the currently
selected file, if you select the panel (with the
tab key or the mouse), you will have access to the
usual viewer commands.
Sort Order...
The eight sort orders are by name, by extension, by modi-
fication time, by access time, and by inode information
modification time, by size, by inode and unsorted. In the
Sort order dialog box you can choose the sort order and
you may also specify if you want to sort in reverse order
by checking the reverse box.
By default directories are sorted before files but this
can be changed from the Options menu (option Mix all files
).
Filter...
The filter command allows you to specify a shell pattern
(for example *.tar.gz ) which the files must match to be
shown. Regardless of the filter pattern, the directories
and the links to directories are always shown in the
directory panel.
Reread
The reread command reload the list of files in the direc-
tory. It is useful if other processes have created or
removed files. If you have panelized file names in a
panel this will reload the directory contents and remove
the panelized information (See the section External panel-
ize for more information).
File Menu
The Midnight Commander uses the F1 - F10 keys as keyboard
shortcuts for commands appearing in the file menu. The
escape sequences for the Fkeys are terminfo capabilities
kf1 trough kf10. On terminals without function key sup-
port, you can achieve the same functionality by pressing
the ESC key and then a number in the range 1 through 9 and
0 (corresponding to F1 to F9 and F10 respectively).
The File menu has the following commands (keyboard short-
cuts in parentheses):
Help (F1)
Invokes the built-in hypertext help viewer. Inside the
help viewer, you can use the Tab key to select the next
link and the Enter key to follow that link. The keys Space
and Backspace are used to move forward and backward in a
help page. Press F1 again to get the full list of accepted
keys.
Menu (F2)
Invoke the user menu. The user menu provides an easy way
to provide users with a menu and add extra features to the
Midnight Commander.
View (F3, Shift-F3)
View the currently selected file. By default this invokes
the Internal File Viewer but if the option "Use internal
view" is off, it invokes an external file viewer specified
by the PAGER environment variable. If PAGER is undefined,
the "view" command is invoked. If you use Shift-F3
instead, the viewer will be invoked without doing any for-
matting or pre processing to the file.
Filtered View (M-!)
this command prompts for a command and it's arguments (the
argument defaults to the currently selected file name),
the output from such command is shown in the internal file
viewer.
Edit (F4)
Currently it invokes the vi editor, or the editor speci-
fied in the EDITOR environment variable, or the Internal
File Editor if the use_internal_edit option is on.
Copy (F5)
Pop up an input dialog with destination that defaults to
the directory in the non-selected panel and copies the
currently selected file (or the tagged files, if there is
at least one file tagged) to the directory specified by
the user in the input dialog. During this process, you can
press C-c or ESC to abort the operation. For details about
source mask (which will be usually either * or ^\(.*\)$
depending on setting of Use shell patterns) and possible
wildcards in the destination see Mask copy/rename.
On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the
background by clicking on the background button (or press-
ing M-b in the dialog box). The Background Jobs is used
to control the background process.
Link (C-x l)
Create a hard link to the current file.
SymLink (C-x s)
Create a symbolic link to the current file. To those of
you who don't know what links are: creating a link to a
file is a bit like copying the file, but both the source
filename and the destination filename represent the same
file image. For example, if you edit one of these files,
all changes you make will appear in both files. Some peo-
ple call links aliases or shortcuts.
A hard link appears as a real file. After making it, there
is no way of telling which one is the original and which
is the link. If you delete either one of them the other
one is still intact. It is very difficult to notice that
the files represent the same image. Use hard links when
you don't even want to know.
A symbolic link is a reference to the name of the original
file. If the original file is deleted the symbolic link is
useless. It is quite easy to notice that the files repre-
sent the same image. The Midnight Commander shows an
"@"-sign in front of the file name if it is a symbolic
link to somewhere (except to directory, where it shows a
tilde (~)). The original file which the link points to is
shown on mini-status line if the Show mini-status option
is enabled. Use symbolic links when you want to avoid the
confusion that can be caused by hard links.
Rename/Move (F6)
Pop up an input dialog that defaults to the directory in
the non-selected panel and moves the currently selected
file (or the tagged files if there is at least one tagged
file) to the directory specified by the user in the input
dialog. During the process, you can press C-c or ESC to
abort the operation. For more details look at Copy opera-
tion above, most of the things are quite similar.
On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the
background by clicking on the background button (or press-
ing M-b in the dialog box). The Background Jobs is used to
control the background process.
Mkdir (F7)
Pop up an input dialog and creates the directory speci-
fied.
Delete (F8)
Delete the currently selected file or the tagged files in
the currently selected panel. During the process, you can
press C-c or ESC to abort the operation.
Quick cd (M-c) Use the quick cd command if you have full
command line and want to cd somewhere.
Select group (+)
This is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Mid-
night Commander will prompt for a regular expression
describing the group. When Shell Patterns are enabled, the
regular expression is much like the filename globbing in
the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ?
standing for one character). If Shell Patterns is off,
then the tagging of files is done with normal regular
expressions (see ed (1)).
To mark directories instead of files, the expression must
start or end with a '/'.
Unselect group (\)
Used for unselecting a group of files. This is the oppo-
site of the Select group command.
Quit (F10, Shift-F10)
Terminate the Midnight Commander. Shift-F10 is used when
you want to quit and you are using the shell wrapper.
Shift-F10 will not take you to the last directory you vis-
ited with the Midnight Commander, instead it will stay at
the directory where you started the Midnight Commander.
Quick cd
This command is useful if you have a full command line and
want to cd somewhere without having to yank and paste the
command line. This command pops up a small dialog, where
you enter everything you would enter after cd on the com-
mand line and then you press enter. This features all the
things that are already in the internal cd command.
Command Menu
The Directory tree command shows a tree figure of the
directories.
The Find file command allows you to search for a specific
file. The "Swap panels" command swaps the contents of the
two directory panels.
The "Panels on/off" command shows the output of the last
shell command. This works only on xterm and on Linux and
SCO console.
The Compare directories (C-x d) command compares the
directory panels with each other. You can then use the
Copy (F5) command to make the panels identical. There are
three compare methods. The quick method compares only file
size and file date. The thorough method makes a full byte-
by-byte compare. The thorough method is not available if
the machine does not support the mmap(2) system call. The
size-only compare method just compares the file sizes and
does not check the contents or the date times, it just
checks the file size.
The Command history command shows a list of typed com-
mands. The selected command is copied to the command line.
The command history can also be accessed by typing M-p or
M-n.
The Directory hotlist (C-\) command makes changing of the
current directory to often used directories faster.
The External panelize allows you to execute an external
program, and make the output of that program the contents
of the current panel.
Extension file edit command allows you to specify programs
to executed when you try to execute, view, edit and do a
bunch of other thing on files with certain extensions
(filename endings). The Menu file edit command may be used
for editing the user menu (which appears by pressing F2).
Directory Tree
The Directory Tree command shows a tree figure of the
directories. You can select a directory from the figure
and the Midnight Commander will change to that directory.
There are two ways to invoke the tree. The real directory
tree command is available from Commands menu. The other
way is to select tree view from the Left or Right menu.
To get rid of long delays the Midnight Commander creates
the tree figure by scanning only a small subset of all the
directories. If the directory which you want to see is
missing, move to its parent directory and press C-r (or
F2).
You can use the following keys:
General movement keys are accepted.
Enter. In the directory tree, exits the directory tree
and changes to this directory in the current panel. In the
tree view, changes to this directory in the other panel
and stays in tree view mode in the current panel.
C-r, F2 (Rescan). Rescan this directory. Use this when
the tree figure is out of date: it is missing subdirecto-
ries or shows some subdirectories which don't exist any
more.
F3 (Forget). Delete this directory from the tree figure.
Use this to remove clutter from the figure. If you want
the directory back to the tree figure press F2 in its par-
ent directory.
F4 (Static/Dynamic). Toggle between the dynamic naviga-
tion mode (default) and the static navigation mode.
In the static navigation mode you can use the Up and Down
keys to select a directory. All known directories are
shown.
In the dynamic navigation mode you can use the Up and Down
keys to select a sibling directory, the Left key to move
to the parent directory, and the Right key to move to a
child directory. Only the parent, sibling and children
directories are shown, others are left out. The tree fig-
ure changes dynamically as you traverse.
F5 (Copy). Copy the directory.
F6 (RenMov). Move the directory.
F7 (Mkdir). Make a new directory below this directory.
F8 (Delete). Delete this directory from the file system.
C-s, M-s. Search the next directory matching the search
string. If there is no such directory these keys will move
one line down.
C-h, Backspace. Delete the last character of the search
string.
Any other character. Add the character to the search
string and move to the next directory which starts with
these characters. In the tree view you must first activate
the search mode by pressing C-s. The search string is
shown in the mini status line.
The following actions are available only in the directory
tree. They aren't supported in the tree view.
F1 (Help). Invoke the help viewer and show this section.
Esc, F10. Exit the directory tree. Do not change the
directory.
The mouse is supported. A double-click behaves like Enter.
See also the section on mouse support.
Find File
The Find File feature first asks for the start directory
for the search and the filename to be searched for. By
pressing the Tree button you can select the start direc-
tory from the directory tree figure.
The contents field accepts regular expressions similar to
egrep(1). That means you have to escape characters with a
special meaning to egrep with "\", e.g. if you search for
"strcmp (" you will have to input "strcmp \(" (without the
double quotes).
You can start the search by pressing the Ok button. Dur-
ing the search you can stop from the Stop button and
continue from the Start button.
You can browse the filelist with the up and down arrow
keys. The Chdir button will change to the directory of the
currently selected file. The Again button will ask for the
parameters for a new search. The Quit button quits the
search operation. The Panelize button will place the found
files to the current directory panel so that you can do
additional operations on them (view, copy, move, delete
and so on). After panelizing you can press C-r to return
to the normal file listing.
It is possible to have a list of directories that the Find
File command should skip during the search (for example,
you may want to avoid searches on a CDROM or on a NFS
directory that is mounted across a slow link).
Directories to be skipped should be set on the variable
find_ignore_dirs in the Misc section of your ~/.mc/ini
file.
Directory components should be separated with a colon,
here is an example:
[Misc]
find_ignore_dirs=/cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs
You may consider using the External panelize command for
some operations. Find file command is for simple queries
only, while using External panelize you can do as mysteri-
ous searches as you would like.
External panelize
The External panelize allows you to execute an external
program, and make the output of that program the contents
of the current panel.
For example, if you want to manipulate in one of the pan-
els all the symbolic links in the current directory, you
can use external panelization to run the following com-
mand:
find . -type l -print
Upon command completion, the directory contents of the
panel will no longer be the directory listing of the cur-
rent directory, but all the files that are symbolic links.
If you want to panelize all of the files that have been
downloaded from your ftp server, you can use this awk com-
mand to extract the file name from the transfer log files:
awk '$9 ~! /incoming/ { print $9 }' < /usr/adm/xferlog
You may want to save often used panelize commands under a
descriptive name, so that you can recall them quickly. You
do this by typing the command on the input line and press-
ing Add new button. Then you enter a name under which you
want the command to be saved. Next time, you just choose
that command from the list and do not have to type it
again.
Hotlist
The Directory hotlist command shows the labels of the
directories in the directory hotlist. The Midnight Comman-
der will change to the directory corresponding to the
selected label. From the hotlist dialog, you can remove
already created label/directory pairs and add new one. For
adding you may want to use a standalone Add to hotlist
command (C-x h), which adds the current directory into the
directory hotlist, as well. The user is prompted for a
label for the directory.
This makes cd to often used directories faster. You may
consider using the CDPATH variable as described in inter-
nal cd command description.
Extension File Edit
This will invoke your editor on the file ~/.mc/ext. The
format of this file is as follows (the format has changed
with version 3.0):
All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.
Lines starting in the first column should have following
format:
keyword/descNL, i.e. everything after keyword/ until new
line is desc
keyword can be:
shell
(desc is then any extension (no wildcards), i.e.
matches all the files *desc . Example: .tar matches
*.tar)
regex
(desc is a regular expression)
type
(file matches this if `file %f` matches regular
expression desc (the filename: part from `file %f`
is removed))
default
(matches any file no matter what desc is)
Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be
of the format:
keyword=commandNL (with no spaces around =), where keyword
should be:
Open (if the user presses Enter or doubleclicks it), View
(F3), Edit (F4), Drop (user drops some files on it) or any
other user defined name (those will be listed in the
extension dependent pop-up menu). Icon name is reserved
for future use by mc.
command is any one-line shell command, with the simple
macro substitution.
Target are evaluated from top to bottom (order is thus
important). If some actions are missing, search continues
as if this target didn't match (i.e. if a file matches the
first and second entry and View action is missing in the
first one, then on pressing F3 the View action from the
second entry will be used. default should catch all the
actions.
Background jobs
This lets you control the state of any background Midnight
Commander process (only copy and move files operations can
be done in the background). You can stop, restart and
kill a background job from here.
Menu File Edit
The user menu is a menu of useful actions that can be cus-
tomized by the user. When you access the user menu, the
file .mc.menu from the current directory is used if it
exists, but only if it is owned by user or root and is not
world-writable. If no such file found, ~/.mc/menu is
tried in the same way, and otherwise mc uses the default
system-wide menu /usr/lib/mc/mc.menu.
The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that
start with anything but space or tab are considered
entries for the menu (in order to be able to use it like a
hot key, the first character should be a letter). All the
lines that start with a space or a tab are the commands
that will be executed when the entry is selected.
When an option is selected all the command lines of the
option are copied to a temporary file in the temporary
directory (usually /usr/tmp) and then that file is exe-
cuted. This allows the user to put normal shell constructs
in the menus. Also simple macro substitution takes place
before executing the menu code. For more information, see
macro substitution.
Here is a sample mc.menu file:
A Dump the currently selected file
od -c %f
B Edit a bug report and send it to root
vi /tmp/mail.$$
mail -s "Midnight Commander bug" root < /tmp/mail.$$
M Read mail
emacs -f rmail
N Read Usenet news
emacs -f gnus
H Call the info hypertext browser
info
J Copy current directory to other panel recursively
tar cf - . | (cd %D && tar xvpf -)
K Make a release of the current subdirectory
echo -n "Name of distribution file: "
read tar
ln -s %d `dirname %d`/$tar
cd ..
tar cvhf ${tar}.tar $tar
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
X Extract the contents of a compressed tar file
tar xzvf %f
Default Conditions
Each menu entry may be preceded by a condition. The condi-
tion must start from the first column with a '=' charac-
ter. If the condition is true, the menu entry will be the
default entry.
Condition syntax: = <sub-cond>
or: = <sub-cond> | <sub-cond> ...
or: = <sub-cond> & <sub-cond> ...
Sub-condition is one of following:
f <pattern> current file matching pattern?
F <pattern> other file matching pattern?
d <pattern> current directory matching pattern?
D <pattern> other directory matching pattern?
t <type> current file of type?
T <type> other file of type?
! <sub-cond> negate the result of sub-condition
Pattern is a normal shell pattern or a regular expression,
according to the shell patterns option. You can override
the global value of the shell patterns option by writing
"shell_patterns=x" on the first line of the menu file
(where "x" is either 0 or 1).
Type is one or more of the following characters:
n not directory
r regular file
d directory
l link
c char special
b block special
f fifo
s socket
x executable
t tagged
For example 'rlf' means either regular file, link or fifo.
The 't' type is a little special because it acts on the
panel instead of the file. The condition '=t t' is true if
there are tagged files in the current panel and false if
not.
If the condition starts with '=?' instead of '=' a debug
trace will be shown whenever the value of the condition is
calculated.
The conditions are calculated from left to right. This
means
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
is calculated as
( (f *.tar.gz) | (f *.tgz) ) & (t n)
Here is a sample of the use of conditions:
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
L List the contents of a compressed tar-archive
gzip -cd %f | tar xvf -
Addition Conditions
If the condition begins with '+' (or '+?') instead of '='
(or '=?') it is an addition condition. If the condition is
true the menu entry will be included in the menu. If the
condition is false the menu entry will not be included in
the menu.
You can combine default and addition conditions by start-
ing condition with '+=' or '=+' (or '+=?' or '=+?' if you
want debug trace). If you want to use two different condi-
tions, one for adding and another for defaulting, you can
precede a menu entry with two condition lines, one start-
ing with '+' and another starting with '='.
Comments are started with '#'. The additional comment
lines must start with '#', space or tab.
Options Menu
The Configuration command pops up a dialog from which you
can change most of settings of the Midnight Commander.
The Display bits command pops up a dialog from which you
may select which characters is your terminal able to dis-
play.
The Confirmation command pops up a dialog from which you
specify which actions you want to confirm.
The Learn keys command pops up a dialog from which you
test some keys which are not working on some terminals and
you may fix them.
The Virtual FS command pops up a dialog from which you
specify some VFS related options.
The Layout command pops up a dialog from which you specify
a bunch of options how mc looks like on the screen.
The Save setup command saves the current settings of the
Left, Right and Options menus. A small number of other
settings is saved, too.
Configuration
The program has some options that may be toggled on and
off from the Configuration dialog. Options are enabled if
they have an asterisk or "x" in front of them. These
options are divided into three groups: Screen Colors,
Panel Options and Other Options.
Screen Colors
You can select whether your display supports color or not.
Normally this information is in the terminfo database. If
you want to know how to change individual colors see the
section on Colors.
Panel Options
Show Backup Files. By default the Midnight Commander
doesn't show files ending in '~' (like GNU's ls option
-B).
Show Hidden Files. By default the Midnight Commander will
show all files that start with a dot (like ls -a).
Mark moves down. By default when you mark a file (with
either C-t or the Insert key) the selection bar will move
down.
Show Mini-Status. If enabled, show one line of status
information at the bottom of the panels about the cur-
rently selected item.
Mix all files. When this option is enabled, all files and
directories are shown mixed together. If the option is
off, directories (and links to directories) are shown at
the beginning of the listing, and other files afterwards.
Fast directory reload. This option is off by default. If
you activate the fast reload, the Midnight Commander will
use a trick to determine if the directory contents have
changed. The trick is to reload the directory only if the
i-node of the directory has changed; this means that
reloads only happen when files are created or deleted. If
what changes is the i-node for a file in the directory
(file size changes, mode or owner changes, etc) the dis-
play is not updated. In these cases, if you have the
option on, you have to rescan the directory manually (with
C-r).
Other Options
Verbose operation. This toggles whether the file Copy,
Rename and Delete operations are verbose (i.e., display a
dialog box for each operation). If you have a slow termi-
nal, you may wish to disable the verbose operation. It is
automatically turned off if the speed of your terminal is
less than 9600 bps.
Pause after run. After executing your commands, the Mid-
night Commander can pause, so that you can examine the
output of the command. There are three possible settings
for this variable:
Never Means that you do not want to see the output
of your command. If you are using the Linux or SCO
console or an xterm, you will be able to see the
output of the command by typing C-o.
On dumb terminals You will get the pause message on
terminals that are not capable of showing the out-
put of the last command executed (any terminal that
is not an xterm or the Linux console).
Always The program will pause after executing all
of your commands.
Shell Patterns. By default the Select, Unselect and Fil-
ter commands will use shell-like regular expressions. The
following conversions are performed to achieve this: the
'*' is replaced by '.*' (zero or more characters); the '?'
is replaced by '.' (exactly one character) and '.' by the
literal dot. If the option is disabled, then the regular
expressions are the ones described in ed(1).
Auto Save Setup. If this option is enabled, when you exit
the Midnight Commander the configurable options of the
Midnight Commander are saved in the ~/.mc/ini file.
Auto menus. If this option is enabled, the user menu will
be invoked at startup. Useful for building menus for non-
unixers.
Use internal editor. If this option is enabled, the
built-in file editor is used to edit files. If the option
is disabled, the editor specified in the EDITOR environ-
ment variable is used. If no editor is specified, vi is
used. See the section on the internal file editor.
Use internal viewer. If this option is enabled, the
built-in file viewer is used to view files. If the option
is disabled, the pager specified in the PAGER environment
variable is used. If no pager is specified, the view com-
mand is used. See the section on the internal file
viewer.
Confirm Delete. This option is toggled on by default, and
will cause the Midnight Commander to ask for confirmation
when deleting a single file.
Cd follows links. This option, if set, causes the Mid-
night Commander to follow the logical chain of directories
when changing current directory either in the panels, or
using the cd command. This is the default behavior of
bash. When unset, the Midnight Commander follows the real
directory structure, so cd .. if you've entered that
directory through a link will move you to the current
directory's real parent and not to the directory where the
link was present.
Display bits
This is used to configure the range of visible characters
on the screen. This setting may be 7-bits if your termi-
nal/curses supports only seven output bits, ISO-8859-1
displays all the characters in the ISO-8859-1 map and full
8 bits is for those terminals that can display full 8 bit
characters.
Confirmation
In this menu you configure the confirmation options for
file deletion, overwriting, execution by pressing enter
and quitting the program.
Learn keys
This dialog lets you test if your keys F1-F20, Home, End,
etc. work properly on your terminal. They often don't,
since many terminal databases are broken.
You can move around with the Tab key, with the vi moving
keys ('h' left, 'j' down, 'k' up and 'l' right) and after
you press any arrow key once (this will mark it OK), then
you can use that key as well.
You test them just by pressing each of them. As soon as
you press a key and the key works properly, OK should
appear next to the name of that key. Once a key is marked
OK it starts to work as usually, e.g. F1 for the first
time will just check that F1 works OK, but from that time
on it will show help. The same applies to the arrow keys.
Tab key should be working always.
If some keys do not work properly, then you won't see OK
after the key name after you have pressed that key. You
may then want to fix it. You do it by pressing the button
of that key (either by mouse or using Tab and Enter).
Then a red message will appear and you will be asked to
type that key. If you want to abort this, press just Esc
and wait until the message disappears. Otherwise type the
key you're asked to type and also wait until the dialog
disappears.
When you finish with all the keys, you may want either to
Save your key fixes into your ~/.mc/ini file into the
[terminal:TERM] section (where TERM is the name of your
current terminal) or to discard them. If all your keys
were working properly and you had not to fix any key, then
(of course) no saving will occur.
Virtual FS
This option gives you control over the settings of the
Virtual File System information cache.
The Midnight Commander keeps in memory the information
related to some of the virtual file systems to speed up
the access to the files in the file system. Since the
information that must be kept may be large (for example,
compressed tar files may be kept in RAM for faster
access), you may want to tune the parameters of the cached
information to decrease your memory usage or to maximize
the speed of access to frequently used file systems.
The Tar file system is quite clever about how it handles
tar files: it just loads the directory entries and when it
needs to use the information contained in the tar file, it
goes and grab it.
In the wild, tar files are usually kept compressed (plain
tar files are species in extinction), and because of the
nature of those files (the directory entries for the tar
files is not there waiting for us to be loaded), the tar
file system has two choices: load the complete, uncom-
pressed tar file into memory or uncompress the file in the
disk in a temporary location and then access the uncom-
pressed file as a regular tar file.
In this dialog box you tell the Midnight Commander which
sizes for compressed tar files you will tolerate to load
into your precious memory. The default setting is set to
one megabyte, this means that compressed tar files whose
size is at most one megabyte will be loaded into core,
otherwise a temporary uncompressed tar file will be cre-
ated to access the contents (all of this is transparent to
the user).
The program will let you add a suffix to specify the units
of the number you typed in, use 'k' for kilobyte and 'm'
for megabyte. Our routine does not accept floating point
numbers, so you can't use ".5 m" to specify 512 kilobytes,
you will have to use "512 k" instead.
Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all
over the disk, it's common that you will leave a tar file
and the re-enter it later. Since uncompression is slow,
the Midnight Commander will cache the information in mem-
ory for a limited amount of time, after you hit the time-
out, all of the memory resources associated with the file
system will be freed. The default timeout is set to one
minute.
Layout
The layout dialog gives you a possibility to change the
general layout of screen. You can specify whether the
menubar, the command prompt, the hintbar and the function
keybar are visible. On the Linux or SCO console you can
specify how many lines are shown in the output window.
The rest of the screen area is used for the two directory
panels. You can specify whether the area is split to the
panels in vertical or horizontal direction. The split can
be equal or you can specify an unequal split.
Save Setup
At startup the Midnight Commander will try to load
initialization information from the ~/.mc/ini file. If
this file doesn't exist, it will load the information from
the system-wide configuration file, located in
/usr/lib/mc/mc.ini. If the system-wide configuration file
doesn't exist, MC uses the default settings.
The Save Setup command creates the ~/.mc/ini file by sav-
ing the current settings of the Left, Right and Options
menus.
If you activate the auto save setup option, MC will always
save the current settings when exiting.
There also exist settings which can't be changed from the
menus. To change these settings you have to edit the setup
file with your favorite editor. See the section on Special
Settings for more information.
Executing operating system commands
You may execute commands by typing them directly in the
Midnight Commander's input line, or by selecting the pro-
gram you want to execute with the selection bar in one of
the panels and hitting Enter.
If you press Enter over a file that is not executable, the
Midnight Commander checks the extension of the selected
file against the extensions in the Extensions File. If a
match is found then the code associated with that exten-
sion is executed. A very simple macro expansion takes
place before executing the command.
The cd internal command
The cd command is interpreted by the Midnight Commander,
it is not passed to the command shell for execution. Thus
it may not handle all of the nice macro expansion and sub-
stitution that your shell does, although it does some of
them:
Tilde substitution The (~) will be substituted with your
home directory, if you append a username after the tilde,
then it will be substituted with the login directory of
the the specified user.
For example, ~guest is the home directory for the user
guest, while ~/guest is the directory guest in your home
directory.
Previous directory You can jump to the directory you were
previously by using the special directory name '-' like
this: cd -
CDPATH directories If the directory specified to the cd
command is not in the current directory, then The Midnight
Commander uses the value in the environment variable
CDPATH to search for the directory in any of the named
directories.
For example you could set your CDPATH variable to
~/src:/usr/src, allowing you to change your directory to
any of the directories inside the ~/src and /usr/src
directories, from any place in the file system by using
it's relative name (for example cd linux could take you to
/usr/src/linux).
Macro Substitution
When accessing a user menu, or executing an extension
dependent command, or running a command from the command
line input, a simple macro substitution takes place.
The macros are:
%f
The current file name.
%d
The current directory name.
%F
The current file in the unselected panel.
%D
The directory name of the unselected panel.
%t
The currently tagged files.
%T
The tagged files in the unselected panel.
%u and %U
Similar to the %t and %T macros, but in addition
the files are untagged. You can use this macro only
once per menu file entry or extension file entry,
because next time there will be no tagged files.
%s and %S
The selected files: The tagged files if there are
any. Otherwise the current file.
%q
Dropped files. In all places except in the Drop
action of the mc.ext file, this will become a null
string, in the Drop action it will be replaced with
a space separated list of files that were dropped
on the file.
%cd
This is a special macro that is used to change the
current directory to the directory specified in
front of it. This is used primarily as an inter-
face to the Virtual File System.
%view
This macro is used to invoke the internal viewer.
This macro can be used alone, or with arguments.
If you pass any arguments to this macro, they
should be enclosed in brackets.
The arguments are: ascii to force the viewer into
ascii mode; hex to force the viewer into hex mode;
nroff to tell the viewer that it should interpret
the bold and underline sequences of nroff; unfor-
mated to tell the viewer to not interpret nroff
commands for making the text bold or underlined.
%%
The % character
%{some text}
Prompt for the substitution. An input box is shown
and the text inside the braces is used as a prompt.
The macro is substituted by the text typed by the
user. The user can press ESC or F10 to cancel. This
macro doesn't work on the command line yet.
The subshell support
The subshell support is a compile time option, that works
with the shells: bash, tcsh and zsh.
When the subshell code is activated the Midnight Commander
will spawn a concurrent copy of your shell (the one
defined in the SHELL variable and if it is not defined,
then the one in the /etc/passwd file) and run it in a
pseudo terminal, instead of invoking a new shell each time
you execute a command, the command will be passed to the
subshell as if you had typed it. This also allows you to
change the environment variables, use shell functions and
define aliases that are valid until you quit the Midnight
Commander.
If you are using bash you can specify startup commands for
the subshell in your ~/.mc/bashrc file and special key-
board maps in the ~/.mc/inputrc file. tcsh users may
specify startup commands in the ~/.mc/tcshrc file.
When the subshell code is used, you can suspend applica-
tions at any time with the sequence C-o and jump back to
the Midnight Commander, if you interrupt an application,
you will not be able to run other external commands until
you quit the application you interrupted.
An extra added feature of using the subshell is that the
prompt displayed by the Midnight Commander is the same
prompt that you are currently using in your shell.
The OPTIONS section has more information on how you can
control the subshell code.
Controlling Midnight Commander
The Midnight Commander defines an environment variable
MC_CONTROL_FILE. The commands executed by MC may give
instructions to MC by writing to the file specified by
this variable. This is only available if you compiled
your copy of the Midnight Commander with the WANT_PARSE
option.
The following instructions are supported.
clear_tags Clear all tags.
tag <filename> Tag specified file.
untag <filename> Untag specified file.
select <filename> Move pointer to file.
change_panel Switch between panels.
cd <path> Change directory.
If the first letter of the instruction is in lower case it
operates on the current panel. If the letter is in upper
case the instruction operates on the other panel. The
additional letters must be in lower case. Instructions
must be separated by exactly one space, tab or newline.
The instructions don't work in the Info, Tree and Quick
views. The first error causes the rest to be ignored.
Chmod
The Chmod window is used to change the attribute bits in a
group of files and directories. It can be invoked with
the C-x c key combination.
The Chmod window has two parts - Permissions and File
In the File section are displayed the name of the file or
directory and its permissions in octal form, as well as
its owner and group.
In the Permissions section there is a set of check buttons
which correspond to the file attribute bits. As you
change the attribute bits, you can see the octal value
change in the File section.
To move between the widgets (buttons and check buttons)
use the arrow keys or the Tab key. To change the state of
the check buttons or to select a button use Space. You
can also use the hotkeys on the buttons to quickly acti-
vate that selection (they are the highlit letters on the
buttons).
To set the attribute bits, use the Enter key.
When working with a group of files or directories, you
just click on the bits you want to set or clear. Once you
have selected the bits you want to change, you select one
of the action buttons (Set marked or Clear marked).
Finally, to set the attributes exactly to those specified,
you can use the [Set all] button, which will act on all
the tagged files.
[Marked all] set only marked attributes to all selected
files
[Set marked] set marked bits in attributes of all selected
files
[Clean marked] clear marked bits in attributes of all
selected files
[Set] set the attributes of one file
[Cancel] cancel the Chmod command
Chown
The Chown command is used to change the owner/group of a
file. The hot key for this command is C-x o.
File Operations
When you copy, move or delete files the Midnight Commander
shows the file operations dialog. It shows the files cur-
rently being operated on and there are at most three
progress bars. The file bar tells how big part of the cur-
rent file has been copied so far. The count bar tells how
many of tagged files have been handled so far. The bytes
bar tells how big part of total size of the tagged files
has been handled so far. If the verbose option is off the
file and bytes bars are not shown.
There are two buttons at the bottom of the dialog. Press-
ing the Skip button will skip the rest of the current
file. Pressing the Abort button will abort the whole oper-
ation, the rest of the files are skipped.
There are three other dialogs which you can run into dur-
ing the file operations.
The error dialog informs about error conditions and has
three choices. Normally you select either the Skip button
to skip the file or the Abort button to abort the opera-
tion altogether. You can also select the Retry button if
you fixed the problem from another terminal.
The replace dialog is shown when you attempt to copy or
move a file on the top of an existing file. The dialog
shows the dates and sizes of the both files. Press the Yes
button to overwrite the file, the No button to skip the
file, the alL button to overwrite all the files, the nonE
button to never overwrite and the Update button to over-
write if the source file is newer than the target file.
You can abort the whole operation by pressing the Abort
button.
The recursive delete dialog is shown when you try to
delete a directory which is not empty. Press the Yes but-
ton to delete the directory recursively, the No button to
skip the directory, the alL button to delete all the
directories and the nonE button to skip all the non-empty
directories. You can abort the whole operation by pressing
the Abort button. If you selected the Yes or alL button
you will be asked for a confirmation. Type "yes" only if
you are really sure you want to do the recursive delete.
If you have tagged files and perform an operation on them
only the files on which the operation succeeded are
untagged. Failed and skipped files are left tagged.
Mask Copy/Rename
The copy/move operations lets you translate the names of
files in an easy way. To do it, you have to specify the
correct source mask and usually in the trailing part of
the destination specify some wildcards. All the files
matching the source mask are copied/renamed according to
the target mask. If there are tagged files, only the
tagged files matching the source mask are renamed.
There are other option which you can set:
Follow links tells whether make the symlinks and hardlinks
in the source directory (recursively in subdirectories)
new links in the target directory or whether would you
like to copy their content.
Dive into subdirs tells what to do if in the target direc-
tory exists a directory with the same name as the
file/directory being copied. The default action is to copy
it into that directory, by disabling this you can copy a
directory's content into that directory. Perhaps an exam-
ple will help:
You want to copy content of a directory foo to /bla/foo,
which is an already existing directory. Normally (when
Dive is set), mc would copy the content into /bla/foo/foo,
'cause the directory already exists. By disabling this
option you will copy it exactly into /bla/foo.
Preserve attributes tells whether to preserve the original
files' permissions, timestamps and if you are root whether
to preserve the original files' UID and GID. If this
option is not set the current value of the umask will be
respected.
Use shell patterns on
When the shell patterns option is on you can use the '*'
and '?' wildcards in the source mask. They work like they
do in the shell. In the target mask only the '*' and
'\<digit>' wildcards are allowed. The first '*' wildcard
in the target mask corresponds to the first wildcard group
in the source mask, the second '*' corresponds to the sec-
ond group and so on. The '\1' wildcard corresponds to the
first wildcard group in the source mask, the '\2' wildcard
corresponds to the second group and so on all the way up
to '\9'. The '\0' wildcard is the whole filename of the
source file.
Two examples:
If the source mask is "*.tar.gz", the destination is
"/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz",
the copy will be "foo.tgz" in "/bla".
Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so
that "file.c" will become "c.file" and so on. The source
mask for this is "*.*" and the destination is "\2.\1".
Use shell patterns off
When the shell patterns option is off the MC doesn't do
automatic grouping anymore. You must use '\(...\)'
expressions in the source mask to specify meaning for the
wildcards in the target mask. This is more flexible but
also requires more typing. Otherwise target masks are sim-
ilar to the situation when the shell patterns option is
on.
Two examples:
If the source mask is "^\(.*\)\.tar\.gz$", the destination
is "/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz",
the copy will be "/bla/foo.tgz".
Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so
that "file.c" will become "c.file" and so on. The source
mask for this is "^\(.*\)\.\(.*\)$" and the destination is
"\2.\1".
Case Conversions
You can also change the case of the filenames. If you use
'\u' or uppercase or lowercase correspondingly.
If you use '\U' or '\L' in the target mask the next char-
acters will be converted to uppercase or lowercase corre-
spondingly up to the next
The '\u' and '\l' are stronger than '\U' and '\L'.
For example, if the source mask is '*' (shell patterns on)
or '^\(.*\)$' (shell patterns off) and the target mask is
'\L\u*' the file names will be converted to have initial
upper case and otherwise lower case.
You can also use '\' as a quote character. For example,
'\\' is a backslash and '\*' is an asterisk.
Internal File Viewer
The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII
and hex. To toggle between modes, use the F4 key. If you
have the GNU gzip program installed, it will be used to
automatically decompress the files on demand.
The viewer will try to use the best method provided by
your system or the file type to display the information.
The internal file viewer will interpret some string
sequences to set the bold and underline attributes, thus
making a pretty display of your files.
When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in
quotes as well as hexadecimal constants.
You can mix quoted text with constants like this: "String"
0xFE 0xBB "more text". Text between constants and quoted
text is just ignored.
Some internal details about the viewer: On systems that
provide the mmap(2) system call, the program maps the file
instead of loading it; if the system does not provide the
mmap(2) system call or the file matches an action that
requires a filter, then the viewer will use it's growing
buffers, thus loading only those parts of the file that
you actually access (this includes compressed files).
Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key
that the Midnight Commander handles in the internal file
viewer.
F1 Invoke the builtin hypertext help viewer.
F2 Toggle the wrap mode.
F4 Toggle the hex mode.
F5 Goto line. This will prompt you for a line number and
will display that line.
F6, /. Regular expression search.
?, Reverse regular expression search.
F7 Normal search / hex mode search.
C-s. Start normal search if there was no previous search
expression else find next match.
C-r. Start reverse search if there was no previous search
expression else find next match.
n. Find next match.
F8 Toggle Raw/Parsed mode: This will show the file as
found on disk or if a processing filter has been specified
in the mc.ext file, then the output from the filter. Cur-
rent mode is always the other than written on the button
label, since on the button is the mode which you enter by
that key.
F9 Toggle the format/unformat mode: when format mode is on
the viewer will interpret some string sequences to show
bold and underline with different colors. Also, on button
label is the other mode than current.
F10, Esc. Exit the internal file viewer.
next-page, space, C-v. Scroll one page forward.
prev-page, M-v, C-b, backspace. Scroll one page backward.
down-key Scroll one line forward.
up-key Scroll one line backward.
C-l Refresh the screen.
! Spawn a shell in the currently working directory.
[n] m Set the mark n.
[n] r Jump to the mark n.
C-f Jump to the next file.
C-b Jump to the previous file.
M-r Toggle the ruler.
It's possible to instruct the file viewer how to display a
file, look at the Extension File Edit section
Internal File Editor
The internal file editor provides most of the features of
common full screen editors. It is invoked using F4 pro-
vided the use_internal_edit option is set in the initial-
ization file. It has an extensible file size limit of six-
teen megabytes and edits binary files flawlessly.
The features it presently supports are: Block copy, move,
delete, cut, paste; key for key undo ; pull-down menus;
file insertion; macro definition; regular expression
search and replace (and our own scanf-printf search and
replace); shift-arrow MSW-MAC text highlighting (for the
linux console only); insert-overwrite toggle; and an
option to pipe text blocks through shell commands like
indent.
The editor is very easy to use and requires no tutoring.
To see what keys do what, just consult the appropriate
pull-down menu. Other keys are: Shift movement keys do
text highlighting. Ctrl-Ins copies to the file
cooledit.clip and Shift-Ins pastes from cooledit.clip.
Shift-Del cuts to cooledit.clip, and Ctrl-Del deletes
highlighted text. The completion key also does a Return
with an automatic indent. Mouse highlighting also works,
and you can override the mouse as usual by holding down
the shift key while dragging the mouse to let normal ter-
minal mouse highlighting work.
To define a macro, press Ctrl-R
and then type out the key strokes you want to be exe-
cuted. Press Ctrl-R
again when finished. You can then assign the macro to any
key you like by pressing that key. The macro is executed
when you press Ctrl-A and then the assigned key. The macro
is also executed if you press Meta, Ctrl, or Esc and the
assigned key, provided that the key is not used for any
other function. Once defined, the macro commands go into
the file cedit/cooledit.macros
in your home directory. You can delete a macro by delet-
ing the appropriate line in this file.
F19 will format C code when it is highlighted. For this to
work, make an executable file called cedit/edit.indent.rc
in your home directory containing the following:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/indent -kr -pcs ~/cedit/cooledit.block >& /dev/null
cat /dev/null > ~/cedit/cooledit.error
You can use scanf search and replace to search and replace
a C format string. First take a look at the sscanf and
sprintf man pages to see what a format string is and how
it works. An example is as follows: Suppose you want to
replace all occurences of say, an open bracket, three
comma seperated numbers, and a close bracket, with the
word apples, the third number, the word oranges and then
the second number, I would fill in the Replace dialog box
as follows:
Enter search string
(%d,%d,%d)
Enter replace string
apples %d oranges %d
Enter replacement argument order
3,2
The last line specifies that the third and then the second
number are to be used in place of the first and second.
It is advisable to use this feature with Prompt on replace
on, because a match is thought to be found whenever the
number of arguments found matches the number given, which
is not always a real match. Scanf also treats whitespace
as being elastic. Note that the scanf format % is very
useful for scanning strings, and whitespace.
The editor also displays non-us characters (160+). When
editing binary files, you should set display bits to 7
bits in the options menu to keep the spacing clean.
See also the file README.edit in the source tree for some
more info.
Completion
Let the Midnight Commander type for you.
Attempt to perform completion on the text before current
position. MC attempts completion treating the text as
variable (if the text begins with $ ), username (if the
text begins with ~ ), hostname (if the text begins with @
) or command (if you are on the command line in the posi-
tion where you might type a command, possible completions
then include shell reserved words and shell builtin com-
mands as well) in turn. If none of these produces a match,
filename completion is attempted.
Filename, username, variable and hostname completion works
on all input lines, command completion is command line
specific. If the completion is ambiguous (there are more
different possibilities), MC beeps and the following
action depends on the setting of the show_all_if_ambiguous
variable in the Initialization file. If it is nonzero, a
list of all possibilities pops up next to the current
position and you can select with the arrow keys and Enter
the correct entry. You can also type the first letters in
which the possibilities differ to move to a subset of all
possibilities and complete as much as possible. If you
press M-Tab again, only the subset will be shown in the
listbox, otherwise the first item which matches all the
previous characters will be highlighted. As soon as there
is no ambiguity, dialog disappears, but you can hide it by
canceling keys Esc, F10 and left and right arrow keys. If
show_all_if_ambiguous is set to zero, the dialog pops up
only if you press M-Tab for the second time, for the first
time MC just beeps.
Virtual File System
The Midnight Commander is provided with a code layer to
access the file system; this code layer is known as the
virtual file system switch. The virtual file system
switch allows the Midnight Commander to manipulate files
not located on the Unix file system.
Currently the Midnight Commander is packaged with five
Virtual File Systems (VFS): the local file system, used
for accessing the regular Unix file system; the ftpfs,
used to manipulate files on remote systems with the FTP
protocol; the tarfs, used to manipulate tar and compressed
tar files; the undelfs, used to recover deleted files on
ext2 file systems (the default file system for Linux sys-
tems) and finally the mcfs (Midnight Commander file sys-
tem), a network based file system.
The VFS switch code will interpret all of the path names
used and will forward them to the correct file system, the
formats used for each one of the file systems is described
later in their own section.
FTP File System
The ftpfs allows you to manipulate files on remote
machines, to actually use it, you may try to use the panel
command FTP link (accessible from the menubar) or you may
directly change your current directory to it using the cd
command to a path name that looks like this:
ftp://[!][user[:pass]@]machine[:port][remote-dir]
The, user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If
you specify the user element, then the Midnight Commander
will try to logon on the remote machine as that user, oth-
erwise it will use your login name. The optional pass
element, if present is the password used for the connec-
tion. This use is not recomented (nor keeping this in
your hotlist, unless you set the appropiate permissions
there, and then, it may not be entirely safe anyways).
Examples:
ftp://ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx/linux/local
ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages
ftp://!behind.firewall.edu/pub
ftp://guest@remote-host.com:40/pub
ftp://miguel:xxx@server/pub
To connect to sites behind a firewall, you will need to
use the prefix ftp://! (ie, with a bang character after
the double slash) to make the Midnight Commander use a
proxy host for doing the ftp transfer. You can define the
proxy host in the Virtual File System dialog box.
Another option is to set the ftpfs_always_use_proxy param-
eter in the initialization file. This will configure the
program to always use the proxy host. If this variable is
set, the program will do two things: consult the
/usr/lib/mc.no_proxy file for lines containing host names
that are local (if the host name starts with a dot, it is
assumed to be a domain) and to assume that any hostnames
without dots in their names are directly accessible.
If you are using the ftpfs code with a filtering packet
router that does not allow you to use the regular mode of
opening files, you may want to force the program to use
the passive-open mode. To use this, set the
ftpfs_use_passive_connections option.
The Midnight Commander keeps the directory listing in a
cache. The cache expire time is configurable in the Vir-
tual File System dialog box. This has the funny behavior
that even if you make changes to a directory, they will
not be reflected in the directory listing until you force
a cache reload with the C-r key. This is a feature (when
you think it's a bug, think about manipulating files on
the other side of the Atlantic with ftpfs).
Tar File System
The tar file system provides you with read-only access to
your tar files and compressed tar files by using the chdir
command. To change your directory to a tar file, you
change your current directory to the tar file by using the
following syntax:
tar:filename.tar[dir-inside-tar]
The mc.ext file already provides a shortcut for tar files,
this means that usually you just point to a tar file and
press return to enter into the tar file, see the Extension
File Edit section for details on how this is done.
Examples:
tar:mc-3.0.tar.gz/mc-3.0/vfs
tar:/ftp/GCC/gcc-2.7.0.tar
The latter specifies the full path of the tar archive.
Network File System
The Midnight Commander file system is a network base file
system that allows you to manipulate the files in a remote
machine as if they were local. To use this, the remote
machine must be running the mcserv(8) server program.
To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir
into a special directory which name is in the following
format:
mc:[user@]machine[:port][remote-dir]
The, user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If
you specify the user element then the Midnight Commander
will try to logon on the remote machine as that user, oth-
erwise it will use your login name.
The port element is used when the remote machine running
on a special port (see the mcserv(8) manual page for more
information about ports); finally, if the remote-dir ele-
ment is present, your current directory on the remote
machine will be set to this one.
Examples:
mc:ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx/linux/local
mc:joe@foo.edu:11321/private
Undelete File System
On Linux systems, if you asked configure to use the ext2fs
undelete facilities, you will have the undelete file sys-
tem available. Recovery of deleted files is only avail-
able on ext2 file systems. The undelete file system is
just an interface to the ext2fs library to: retrieve all
of the deleted files names on an ext2fs and provides and
to extract the selected files into a regular partition.
To use this file system, you have to chdir into the spe-
cial file name formed by the "undel:" prefix and the file
name where the actual file system resides.
For example, to recover deleted files on the second parti-
tion of the first scsi disk on Linux, you would use the
following path name:
undel:/dev/sda2
It may take a while for the undelfs to load the required
information before you start browsing files there.
Colors
The Midnight Commander will try to detect if your terminal
supports color using the terminal database and your termi-
nal name. Sometimes it gets confused, so you may force
color mode or disable color mode using the -c and -b flag
respectively.
If the program is compiled with the Slang screen manager
instead of ncurses, it will also check the variable COL-
ORTERM, if it is set, it has the same effect as the -c
flag.
You may specify terminals that always force color mode by
adding the color_terminals variable to the Colors section
of the initialization file. This will prevent the Midnight
Commander from trying to detect if your terminal supports
color. Example:
[Colors]
color_terminals=linux,xterm
<tscreen><verb>
color_terminals=terminal-name1,terminal-name2...
The program can be compiled with both ncurses and slang,
ncurses does not provide a way to force color mode:
ncurses uses just the information in the terminal
database.
The Midnight Commander provides a way to change the
default colors. Currently the colors are configured using
the environment variable MC_COLOR_TABLE or the Colors sec-
tion in the initialization file.
In the Colors section, the default color map is loaded
from the base_color variable. You can specify an alter-
nate color map for a terminal by using the terminal name
as the key in this section. Example:
[Colors]
base_color=
xterm=menu=magenta:marked=,magenta:markselect=,red
The format for the color definition is:
<keyword>=<foregroundcolor>,<backgroundcolor>:<keyword>= ...
The colors are optional, and the keywords are: normal,
selected, marked, markselect, errors, input, reverse menu,
menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel, gauge; the dialog colors
are: dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus; Help colors
are: helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold, helplink, help-
slink; Viewer color is: viewunderline; Special highlight-
ing mode: executable, directory, link, device, special.
The dialog boxes use the following colors: dnormal is used
for the normal text, dfocus is the color used for the cur-
rently selected component, dhotnormal is the color used to
differentiate the hotkey color in normal components,
whereas the dhotfocus col