MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)NAMEmc - Visual shell for Unix-like systems.
USAGEmc [-abcCdfhPstuUVx] [-l log] [dir1 [dir2]] [-e [file]] [-v file]
DESCRIPTION
GNU Midnight Commander is a directory browser/file manager for
Unix-like operating systems.
OPTIONS-a, --stickchars
Disable usage of graphic characters for line drawing.
-b, --nocolor
Force black and white display.
-c, --color
Force color mode, please check the section Colors for more
information.
-C arg, --colors=arg
Specify a different color set in the command line. The format
of arg is documented in the Colors section.
-S arg Specify a name of skin in the command line. Technology of skins
is documented in the Skins. section.
-d, --nomouse
Disable mouse support.
-e [file], --edit[=file]
Start the internal editor. If the file is specified, open it on
startup. See also mcedit (1).
-f, --datadir
Display the compiled-in search paths for Midnight Commander
files.
-k, --resetsoft
Reset softkeys to their default from the termcap/terminfo
database. Only useful on HP terminals when the function keys
don't work.
-K file
Specify a name of keymap file in the command line.
-l file, --ftplog=file
Save the ftpfs dialog with the server in file.
-P file, --printwd=file
Print the last working directory to the specified file. This
option is not meant to be used directly. Instead, it's used
from a special shell script that automatically changes the
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 1
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
current directory of the shell to the last directory the Mid-
night Commander was in. Source the file
/usr/local/share/mc/bin/mc.sh (bash and zsh users) or
/usr/local/share/mc/bin/mc.csh (tcsh users) respectively to
define mc as an alias to the appropriate shell script.
-s Set alternative mode drawing of frameworks. If the section
[Lines] is not filled, the symbol for the pseudographics frame
is a space, otherwise the frame characters are taken from follow
params.
You can redefine the following variables:
lefttop
left-top corner
righttop
right-top corner
centertop
center-top cross
centerbottom
center-bottom cross
leftbottom
left-bottom corner
rightbottom
right-bottom corner
leftmiddle
left-middle cross
rightmiddle
right-middle cross
centermiddle
center cross
horiz default horizontal line
vert default vertical line
thinhoriz
thin horizontal line
thinvert
thin vertical line
-t, --termcap
Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and terminfo: it
makes the Midnight Commander use the value of the TERMCAP vari-
able for the terminal information instead of the information on
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 2
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
the system wide terminal database
-u, --nosubshell
Disable use of the concurrent shell (only makes sense if the
Midnight Commander has been built with concurrent shell sup-
port).
-U, --subshell
Enable 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, --view=file
Start the internal viewer to view the specified file. See also
mcview (1).
-V, --version
Display the version of the program.
-x, --xterm
Force 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 directory 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 line from the bottom 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 visi-
ble, 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 directory
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 Panels, the Left and Right Menus and the File Menu.
You can execute system commands from the Midnight Commander 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 com-
mand 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 when-
ever you are running on an xterm(1) terminal (it even works if you take
a telnet, ssh or rlogin connection to another machine from the xterm)
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 3
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 page up. Likewise, a click on the bottom
frame line will cause scrolling one page down. 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 editing the ~/.mc/ini file and
changing the mouse_repeat_rate parameter.
If you are running the Midnight Commander with the mouse support, you
can get the default mouse behavior (cutting and pasting text) by hold-
ing 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 manual we will use the following abbrevia-
tions:
C-<chr>
means hold the Control key while typing the character <chr>.
Thus C-f would be: hold the Control key and type f.
Alt-<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>.
S-<chr>
means hold the Shift key down while typing <chr>.
All input lines in the Midnight Commander use an approximation to the
GNU Emacs editor's key bindings (default).
You may redefine key bindings. See redefine hotkey bindings
for more info. All other key bindings (described in this manual) rela-
tive to default behavior.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 4
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 enter-
ing and editing command lines. Most of these copy file names and such
from the directory panels to the command line (to avoid excessive typ-
ing) 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.
Redefine hotkey bindings
Hotkey bindings may be readed from external file (keymap-file). A
keymap-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one
found):
1) command line option -K <keymap> or --keymap=<keymap>
2) Environment variable MC_KEYMAP
3) In config file parameter keymap in section [MidhightComman-
der]
4) File ~/.mc/mc.keymap
5) File /etc/mc/mc.keymap
6) File /usr/local/share/mc/mc.keymap
Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file
may contain the absolute path to the keymap-file (with the extension
.keymap or without it). Search of keymap-file will occur in (to the
first one found):
1) ~/.mc/
2) /etc/mc/
3) /usr/local/share/mc/
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 executed. 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 executable file then it is executed. Finally, if
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 5
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
the extension of the selected file name matches one of the
extensions in the extensions file then the corresponding command
is executed.
C-l repaint all the information in the Midnight Commander.
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.
Alt-! executes the Filtered view command, described in the view com-
mand.
Alt-? executes the Find file command.
Alt-c pops up the quick cd dialog.
C-o when the program is being run in the Linux or FreeBSD console or
under an xterm, it will show you the output of the previous com-
mand. 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 pro-
grams from the Midnight Commander until you terminate the suspended
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.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 6
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Insert, C-t
to tag files you may use the Insert key (the kich1 terminfo
sequence). To untag files, just retag a tagged file.
M-e to change charset of panel you may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is
made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the
recoding you may select "directory up" (..) in active panel. To
cancel the charsets in all directories, select "No translation "
in the dialog of encodings.
Alt-g, Alt-r, Alt-j
used to select the top file in a panel, the middle file and the
bottom one, respectively.
C-s, Alt-s
start a filename search in the directory listing. When the
search is active, the user input 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 selection 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.
Alt-t toggle the current display listing to show the next display
listing mode. With this it is possible to quickly switch to
brief listing, long listing, user defined listing mode, and back
to the default.
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 selection options. When Files only
checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If Files only is
off, as files as directories will be selected. When Shell Pat-
terns checkbox is on, 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)). When Case sensitive checkbox is on,
the selection will be case sensitive characters. If Case sensi-
tive is off, the case will be ignored.
\ (backslash)
use the "\" key to unselect a group of files. This is the oppo-
site 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.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 7
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
home, a1, Alt-<
move the selection bar to the first entry in the panel.
end, c1, Alt->
move the selection bar to the last entry in the panel.
next-page, C-v
move the selection bar one page down.
prev-page, Alt-v
move the selection bar one page up.
Alt-o If the currently selected file is a directory, load that direc-
tory on the other panel and moves the selection to the next
file. If the currently selected file is not a directory, load
the parent directory on the other panel and moves the selection
to the next file.
Alt-i make the current directory of the current panel also the current
directory of the other panel. Put the other panel to the list-
ing mode if needed. If the current panel is panelized, the
other panel doesn't become panelized.
C-PageUp, C-PageDown
only when supported by the terminal: change to ".." and to the
currently selected directory respectively.
Alt-y moves to the previous directory in the history, equivalent to
clicking the < with the mouse.
Alt-u moves to the next directory in the history, equivalent to click-
ing the > with the mouse.
Alt-Shift-h, Alt-H
displays the directory history, equivalent to depressing the 'v'
with the mouse.
Shell Command Line
This section lists keys which are useful to avoid excessive typing when
entering shell commands.
Alt-Enter
copy the currently selected file name to the command line.
C-Enter
same a Alt-Enter. May not work on remote systems and some ter-
minals.
C-Shift-Enter
copy the full path name of the currently selected file to the
command line. May not work on remote systems and some termi-
nals.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 8
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Alt-Tab
does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname com-
pletion 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 com-
mand 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 oth-
erwise interpreted by the Midnight Commander (like the '+' sym-
bol)
Alt-p, Alt-n
use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p
takes you to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
Alt-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, Alt-v
moves one page up.
Next Page, Page Down, C-v
moves one page down.
Home, A1
moves to the beginning.
End, C1
move to the end.
The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following keys in addi-
tion the to ones mentioned above:
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 9
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete
moves one page up.
Space bar
moves one page down.
u, d moves one half of a page up or down.
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.
Alt-f moves one word forward.
Alt-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.
Alt-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.
Alt-p, Alt-n
Use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p
takes you to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.
Alt-C-h, Alt-Backspace
delete one word backward.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 10
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Alt-Tab
does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname com-
pletion 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", "Com-
mand", "Options" and "Right".
The Left and Right Menus allow you to modify the appearance 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.
The Options Menu lists the actions which allow you to customize the
Midnight Commander.
Left and Right (Above and Below) Menus
The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from the Left and
Right menus (they are named Above and Below when the horizontal panel
split is chosen from the Layout options dialog).
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 modification time.
The brief view shows only the file name and it has two columns (there-
fore showing twice as many files as other views). The long view is sim-
ilar 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 specifier. 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 speci-
fier. This are the available fields you may display:
name displays the file name.
size displays the file size.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 11
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
bsize is an alternative form of the 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 wide type field. This character is
similar to what is displayed by ls with the -F flag - * for exe-
cutable files, / for directories, @ for links, = for sockets, -
for character devices, + for block devices, | for pipes, ~ for
symbolic links to directories and ! for stale symlinks (links
that point nowhere).
mark an asterisk if the file is tagged, a space if it's not.
mtime file's last modification time.
atime file's last access time.
ctime file's status change 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 can use following keywords to define the panel layout:
space a space in the display format.
| add a vertical line to the display format.
To force one field to a fixed size (a size specifier), you just add :
followed by the number of characters you want the field to have. If
the number is followed by the symbol +, then the size specifies the
minimal field size - if the program finds out that there is more space
on the screen, it will then expand that 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
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 12
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 modification 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 directory. 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 panelize
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
function keys are terminfo capabilities kf1 trough kf10. On terminals
without function key support, 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 shortcuts in paren-
theses):
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 13
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 VIEWER environment variable. If
VIEWER is undefined, the PAGER environment variable is tried. If PAGER
is also undefined, the "view" command is invoked. If you use Shift-F3
instead, the viewer will be invoked without doing any formatting or
preprocessing to the file.
Filtered View (Alt-!)
This command prompts for a command and its arguments (the argument
defaults to the currently selected file name), the output from such
command is shown in the internal file viewer.
Edit (F4, F14)
Press F4 to edit the highlighted file. Press F14 (usually Shift-F4) to
start the editor with a new, empty file. Currently they invoke the vi
editor, or the editor specified in the EDITOR environment variable, or
the Internal File Editor if the use_internal_edit option is on.
Copy (F5, F15)
Press F5 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file
(or the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. During this pro-
cess, 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 desti-
nation see Mask copy/rename.
F15 (usually Shift-F5) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
any tagged files.
On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
box). The Background Jobs is used to control the background process.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 14
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 people 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 represent the same image. The Midnight Comman-
der 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, F16)
Press F6 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file
(or the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. For more details
look at Copy (F5) operation above, most of the things are quite simi-
lar.
F16 (usually Shift-F6) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
any tagged files.
On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-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 specified.
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.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 15
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Quick cd (Alt-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 Midnight Commander
will prompt for a selection options. When Files only checkbox is on,
only files will be selected. If Files only is off, as files as direc-
tories will be selected. When Shell Patterns checkbox is on, the regu-
lar expression is much like the filename globbing in the shell (*
standing for zero or more characters and ? standing for one charac-
ter). If Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging of files is done with
normal regular expressions (see ed (1)). When Case sensitive checkbox
is on, the selection will be case sensitive characters. If Case sensi-
tive is off, the case will be ignored.
Unselect group (\)
Used to unselect a group of files. This is the opposite 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 visited 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 com-
mand pops up a small dialog, where you enter everything you would enter
after cd on the command 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 pan-
els.
The "Panels on/off" command shows the output of the last shell command.
This works only on xterm and on Linux and FreeBSD 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 com-
pare method just compares the file sizes and does not check the con-
tents or the date times, it just checks the file size.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 16
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
The Command history command shows a list of typed commands. The
selected command is copied to the command line. The command history can
also be accessed by typing Alt-p or Alt-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 press-
ing 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 fig-
ure by scanning only a small subset of all the directories. If the
directory which you want to see is missing, move to its parent direc-
tory 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 subdirectories or shows some subdirecto-
ries 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 parent directory.
F4 (Static/Dynamic). Toggle between the dynamic navigation 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
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 17
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
select a sibling directory, the Left key to move to the parent direc-
tory, 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 figure 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, Alt-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 directory 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).
Option form whole words. Like grep -w
You can start the search by pressing the OK button. During 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 addi-
tional operations on them (view, copy, move, delete and so on). After
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 18
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 CD-ROM or on a NFS directory that is mounted across a
slow link).
Directories to be skipped should be set on the variable ignore_dirs in
the FindFile section of your ~/.mc/ini file.
Directory components should be separated with a colon, here is an exam-
ple:
[FindFile]
ignore_dirs=/cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs
You may consider using the External panelize command for some opera-
tions. Find file command is for simple queries only, while using Exter-
nal panelize you can do as mysterious 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 panels all the
symbolic links in the current directory, you can use external paneliza-
tion to run the following command:
find . -type l -print
Upon command completion, the directory contents of the panel will no
longer be the directory listing of the current 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 command to extract the file name
from the transfer log files:
awk '$9 ~! /incoming/ { print $9 }' < /var/log/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 pressing 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 Commander will change to the
directory corresponding to the selected label. From the hotlist dia-
log, you can remove already created label/directory pairs and add new
ones. To add new directories quickly, you can use the Add to hotlist
command (C-x h), which adds the current directory into the directory
hotlist, asking just for the label for the directory.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 19
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
This makes cd to often used directories faster. You may consider using
the CDPATH variable as described in internal cd command description.
Extension File Edit
This will invoke your editor on the file ~/.mc/bindings. The format of
this file following:
All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.
Lines starting in the first column should have following format:
keyword/expr, i.e. everything after the slash until new line is expr.
keyword can be:
shell - expr is an extension (no wildcards). File matches it its name
ends with expr. Example: shell/.tar matches *.tar.
regex - expr is a regular expression. File matches if its name
matches the regular expression.
directory
- expr is a regular expression. File matches if it is a direc-
tory and its name matches the regular expression.
type - expr is a regular expression. File matches if the output of
file %f without the initial "filename:" part matches regular
expression expr.
default
- matches any file. expr is ignored.
include
- denotes a common section. expr is the name of the section.
Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be of the for-
mat: keyword=command (with no spaces around =), where keyword should
be: Open (invoked on Enter or double click), View (F3), Edit (F4) or
Include (to add rules from the common section). command is any
one-line shell command, with the simple macro substitution.
Rules are matched from top to bottom, thus the order is important. If
the appropriate action is missing, search continues as if this rule
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 match 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 back-
ground). You can stop, restart and kill a background job from here.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 20
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Menu File Edit
The user menu is a menu of useful actions that can be customized 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/local/share/mc/mc.menu.
The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that start with any-
thing 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 let-
ter). 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 executed. 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
I=`mktemp ${MC_TMPDIR:-/tmp}/mail.XXXXXX` || exit 1
vi $I
mail -s "Midnight Commander bug" root < $I
rm -f $I
M Read mail
emacs -f rmail
N Read Usenet news
emacs -f gnus
H Call the info hypertext browser
info
J Copy current directory to other panel recursively
tar cf - . | (cd %D && tar xvpf -)
K Make a release of the current subdirectory
echo -n "Name of distribution file: "
read tar
ln -s %d `dirname %d`/$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
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 21
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Default Conditions
Each menu entry may be preceded by a condition. The condition must
start from the first column with a '=' character. 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:
y <pattern> syntax of current file matching pattern?
(for edit menu only)
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?
x <filename> is it executable filename?
! <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 a directory
r regular file
d directory
l link
c character device
b block device
f FIFO (pipe)
s socket
x executable file
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)
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 22
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 starting condition
with '+=' or '=+' (or '+=?' or '=+?' if you want debug trace). If you
want to use two different conditions, one for adding and another for
defaulting, you can precede a menu entry with two condition lines, one
starting with '+' and another starting with '='.
Comments are started with '#'. The additional comment lines must start
with '#', space or tab.
Options Menu
The Midnight Commander has some options that may be toggled on and off
in several dialogs which are accessible from this menu. Options are
enabled if they have an asterisk or "x" in front of them.
The Configuration command pops up a dialog from which you can change
most of settings of the Midnight Commander.
The Layout command pops up a dialog from which you specify a bunch of
options how mc looks like on the screen.
The Confirmation command pops up a dialog from which you specify which
actions you want to confirm.
The Display bits command pops up a dialog from which you may select
which characters is your terminal able to display.
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 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 options in this dialog are divided into three groups: Panel
Options, Pause after run and Other Options.
Panel Options
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 23
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Use SI size units. If this option is set, Midnight Commander will use
SI units (powers of 1000) when displaying any byte sizes. The suffixes
(k, m ...) are shown in lowercase. If unset (default), Midnight Com-
mander will use binary units (powers of 1024) and the suffixes are
shown in upper case (K, M ...)
Show Backup Files. If enabled, the Midnight Commander will show files
ending with a tilde. Otherwise, they won't be shown (like GNU's ls
option -B).
Show Hidden Files. If enabled, the Midnight Commander will show all
files that start with a dot (like ls -a).
Mark moves down. If enabled, the selection bar will move down when you
mark a file (with Insert key).
Drop down menus. When this option is enabled, the pull down menus will
be activated as soon as you press the F9 key. Otherwise, you will only
get the menu title, and you will have to activate the menu either with
the arrow keys or with the hotkeys. It is recommended if you are using
hotkeys.
Mix all files. If 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 below.
Fast directory reload. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Comman-
der 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
display is not updated. In these cases, if you have the option on, you
have to rescan the directory manually (with C-r).
Pause after run
After executing your commands, the Midnight Commander can pause, so
that you can examine the output of the command. There are three possi-
ble 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 FreeBSD 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 output 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.
Other Options
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 24
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 terminal, you may wish to disable the
verbose operation. It is automatically turned off if the speed of your
terminal is less than 9600 bps.
Compute totals. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander com-
putes total byte sizes and total number of files prior to any Copy,
Rename and Delete operations. This will provide you with a more accu-
rate progress bar at the expense of some speed. This option has no
effect, if Verbose operation is disabled.
Shell Patterns. By default the Select, Unselect and Filter 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 edi-
tor is used to edit files. If the option is disabled, the editor speci-
fied in the EDITOR environment variable is used. If no editor is spec-
ified, 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 command is used. See the section on the internal
file viewer.
Complete: show all. By default the Midnight Commander pops up all pos-
sible completions if the completion is ambiguous only when you press
Alt-Tab for the second time. For the first time, it just completes as
much as possible and beeps in the case of ambiguity. Enable this
option if you want to see all possible completions even after pressing
Alt-Tab the first time.
Rotating dash. If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander shows
a rotating dash in the upper right corner as a work in progress indica-
tor.
Lynx-like motion. If this option is enabled, you may use the arrows
keys to automatically chdir if the current selection is a subdirectory
and the shell command line is empty. By default, this setting is off.
Cd follows links. This option, if set, causes the Midnight Commander
to follow the logical chain of directories when changing current
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 25
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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.
Safe delete. If this option is enabled, deleting files and directory
hotlist entries unintentionally becomes more difficult. The default
selection in the confirmation dialogs for deletion changes from "Yes"
to "No". This option is disabled by default.
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 FreeBSD
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 hor-
izontal direction. The split can be equal or you can specify an unequal
split.
You can specify whether permissions and file types should be high-
lighted with distinctive Colors. If the permission highlighting is
enabled, the parts of the perm and mode display fields which apply to
the user running Midnight Commander are highlighted with the color
defined by the selected keyword. If the file type highlighting is
enabled, file names are colored according to rules described in
/etc/mc/filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for more info.
If the Show Mini-Status option is enabled, one line of status informa-
tion about the currently selected item is shown at the bottom of the
panels.
When run in a terminal emulator for X11, Midnight Commander sets the
terminal window title to the current working directory and updates it
when necessary. If your terminal emulator is broken and you see some
incorrect output on startup and directory change, turn off the Xterm
Window Title option.
Confirmation
In this menu you configure the confirmation options for file deletion,
directory hotlist entries deletion, overwriting, execution by pressing
enter and quitting the program.
Display bits
This is used to configure the range of visible characters on the
screen. This setting may be 7-bits if your terminal/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.
Learn keys
This dialog allows you to test and redefine functional keys, cursor
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 26
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
arrows and some other keys to make them work properly on your terminal.
They often don't, since many terminal databases are incomplete or bro-
ken.
You can move around with the Tab key and with the vi moving keys ('h'
left, 'j' down, 'k' up and 'l' right). Once you press any cursor move-
ment key and it is recognized, you can use that key as well.
You can test keys just by pressing each of them. When you press a key
and it is recognized properly, OK should appear next to the name of
that key. Once a key is marked OK it starts working as usually, e.g.
F1 pressed the first time will just check that the F1 key works, but
after that it will show help. The same applies to the arrow keys. The
Tab key should be working always.
If some keys do not work properly then you won't see OK appear after
pressing one of these. Then you may want to redefine it. Do it by
pressing the button with the name of that key (either by the mouse or
by Enter or Space after selecting the button with Tab or arrows). Then
a message box will appear asking you to press that key. Do it and wait
until the message box disappears. If you want to abort, just press
Escape once and wait.
When you finish with all the keys, you can Save them. The definitions
for the keys you have redefined will be written into the [termi-
nal:TERM] section of your ~/.mc/ini file (where TERM is the name of
your current terminal). The definitions of the keys that were already
working properly are not saved.
Virtual FS
This option gives you control over the settings of the Virtual File
System.
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 (for example, directory listings fetched from FTP servers).
Also, in order to access the contents of compressed files (for example,
compressed tar files) the Midnight Commander needs to create temporary
uncompressed files on your disk.
Since both the information in memory and the temporary files on disk
take up resources, you may want to tune the parameters of the cached
information to decrease your resource usage or to maximize the speed of
access to frequently used file systems.
Because of the format of the tar archives, the Tar filesystem needs to
read the whole file just to load the file entries. Since most tar
files are usually kept compressed (plain tar files are species in
extinction), the tar file system has to uncompress the file on the disk
in a temporary location and then access the uncompressed file as a reg-
ular tar file.
Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all over the disk,
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 27
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
it's common that you will leave a tar file and the re-enter it later.
Since decompression is slow, the Midnight Commander will cache the
information in memory for a limited time. When the timeout expires,
all the resources associated with the file system are released. The
default timeout is set to one minute.
The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to browse directories on remote
FTP servers. It has several options.
ftp anonymous password is the password used when you login as "anony-
mous". Some sites require a valid e-mail address. On the other hand,
you probably don't want to give your real e-mail address to untrusted
sites, especially if you are not using spam filtering.
ftpfs keeps the directory listing it fetches from a FTP server in a
cache. The cache expire time is configurable with the ftpfs directory
cache timeout option. A low value for this option may slow down every
operation on the ftpfs because every operation would require sending a
request to the FTP server.
You can define an FTP proxy host for doing FTP. Note that most modern
firewalls are fully transparent at least for passive FTP (see below),
so FTP proxies are considered obsolete.
If Always use ftp proxy is not set, you can use the exclamation sign to
enable proxy for certain hosts. See FTP File System for examples.
If this option is set, the program will do two things: consult the
/usr/local/lib/mc/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. All other hosts will be accessed through the
specified FTP proxy.
You can enable using ~/.netrc file, which keeps login names and pass-
words for ftp servers. See netrc (5) for the description of the .netrc
format.
Use passive mode enables using FTP passive mode, when the connection
for data transfer is initiated by the client, not by the server. This
option is recommended and enabled by default. If this option is turned
off, the data connection is initiated by the server. This may not work
with some firewalls.
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/local/share/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 saving the current
settings of the Left, Right and Options menus.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 28
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 informa-
tion.
Executing operating system commands
You may execute commands by typing them directly in the Midnight Com-
mander's input line, or by selecting the program 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 exten-
sions in the Extensions File. If a match is found then the code asso-
ciated with that extension 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 substitution that your shell does,
although it does some of them:
Tilde substitution. The (~) will be substituted with your home direc-
tory, if you append a username after the tilde, then it will be substi-
tuted with the login directory of 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 its 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 com-
mand, or running a command from the command line input, a simple macro
substitution takes place.
The macros are:
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 29
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
%i The indent of blank space, equal the cursor column position.
For edit menu only.
%y The syntax type of current file. For edit menu only.
%k The block file name.
%e The error file name.
%m The current menu name.
%f and %p
The current file name.
%x The extension of current file name.
%b The current file name without extension.
%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.
%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 interface 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; unformatted to tell the viewer to not interpret nroff
commands for making the text bold or underlined.
%% The % character
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 30
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
%{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.
%var{ENV:default}
If environment variable ENV is unset, the default is substi-
tuted. Otherwise, the value of ENV is substituted.
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 vari-
ables, 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 keyboard maps in the ~/.mc/inpu-
trc file. tcsh users may specify startup commands in the ~/.mc/tcshrc
file.
When the subshell code is used, you can suspend applications 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 exter-
nal commands until you quit the application you interrupted.
An extra added feature of using the subshell is that the prompt dis-
played by the Midnight Commander is the same prompt that you are cur-
rently using in your shell.
The OPTIONS section has more information on how you can control the
subshell code.
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 combina-
tion.
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 corre-
spond to the file attribute bits. As you change the attribute bits,
you can see the octal value change in the File section.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 31
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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 activate them. Hotkeys are shown as highlighted 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.
Advanced Chown
The Advanced Chown command is the Chmod and Chown command combined into
one window. You can change the permissions and owner/group of files at
once.
File Operations
When you copy, move or delete files the Midnight Commander shows the
file operations dialog. It shows the files currently being processed
and uses up to three progress bars. The file bar indicates the per-
centage of the current file that has been processed so far. The count
bar shows how many of the tagged files have been handled. The bytes
bar indicates the percentage of the total size of the tagged files that
has been handled. If the verbose option is off, the file and bytes
bars are not shown.
There are two buttons at the bottom of the dialog. Pressing the Skip
button will skip the rest of the current file. Pressing the Abort but-
ton will abort the whole operation, the rest of the files are skipped.
There are three other dialogs which you can run into during 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
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 32
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Abort button to abort the operation 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 overwrite 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 button 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 let 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 options which you can set:
Follow links
determines whether make the symlinks and hardlinks in the source direc-
tory (recursively in subdirectories) new links in the target directory
or whether would you like to copy their content.
Dive into subdirs
determines the behavior when the source directory is about to be
copied, but the target directory already exists. The default action is
to copy the contents of the source directory into the target directory.
Enabling this option causes copying the source directory itself into
the target directory.
For example, you want to copy directory /foo containing file bar to
/bla/foo, which is an already existing directory. Normally (when Dive
into subdirs is not set), mc would copy file /foo/bar into the file
/bla/foo/bar. By enabling this option the /bla/foo/foo directory will
be created, and /foo/bar will be copied into /bla/foo/foo/bar.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 33
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Preserve attributes
determines whether to preserve the permissions, timestamps and (if you
are root) the ownership of the original files. 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 '?' wild-
cards 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 second
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".
Suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c" would
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 '\l'
in the target mask, the next character will be converted to uppercase
or lowercase correspondingly.
If you use '\U' or '\L' in the target mask, the next characters will be
converted to uppercase or lowercase correspondingly up to the next '\E'
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 34
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
or next '\U', '\L' or the end of the file name.
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 back-
slash and '\*' is an asterisk.
Stable symlinks
commands Midnight Commander, that it should change symlinks in the tar-
get, so that they'll point to the same location as it did before. With
absolute symbolic links this does nothing, but if you have a relative
one, it will recompute its value, adding necessary ../ and other direc-
tory parts and making the value as short as possible (most modern
filesystems keep short symlinks inside inodes and thus don't waste much
disk space).
Select/Unselect Files
The dialog of group of files and directories selection or uselection.
The input line allow enter the regular expression of filenames that
will be selected/unselected.
When Files only checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If Files
only is off, as files as directories will be selected. When Shell Pat-
terns checkbox is on, 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)). When
Case sensitive checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive
characters. If Case sensitive is off, the case will be ignored.
Internal File Viewer
The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII and hex. To
toggle between modes, use the F4 key.
The viewer will try to use the best method provided by your system or
the file type to display the information. Some character sequences,
which appear most often in preformatted manual pages, are displayed
bold and underlined, thus making a pretty display of your files.
When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in quotes and con-
stant numbers. Text in quotes is matched exactly after removing the
quotes. Each number matches one byte. You can mix quoted text with
constants like this:
"String" -1 0xBB 012 "more text"
Note that 012 is an octal number. -1 is converted to 0xFF.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 35
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key that the Mid-
night Commander handles in the internal file viewer.
F1 Invoke the built-in 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, F17, n. 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.
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. Current 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, Alt-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.
C-o Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.
! Like C-o, but run a new shell if the subshell is not running.
[n] m Set the mark n.
[n] r Jump to the mark n.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 36
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
C-f Jump to the next file.
C-b Jump to the previous file.
Alt-r Toggle the ruler.
Alt-e to change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recod-
ing is made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the
recoding you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
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 is a full-featured full screen editor. It can
edit files up to 64 megabytes. It is possible to edit binary files.
The internal file editor is invoked using F4 if the use_internal_edit
option is set in the initialization file.
The features it presently supports are: block copy, move, delete, cut,
paste; key for key undo; pull-down menus; file insertion; macro com-
mands; regular expression search and replace; shift-arrow text high-
lighting (if supported by the terminal); insert-overwrite toggle; word
wrap; autoindent; tunable tab size; syntax highlighting for various
file types; and an option to pipe text blocks through shell commands
like indent and ispell.
Sections:
Options of editor in ini-file
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. 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 executed. 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 .mc/cedit/cooledit.macros in your
home directory. You can delete a macro by deleting the appropriate line
in this file.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 37
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
To change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e). Recoding is
made from selected codepage into system codepage. To cancel the recod-
ing you may select "<No translation>" in charset selection dialog.
F19 will format the currently highlighted block (plain text or C or C++
code or another). This is controlled by the file
/usr/local/share/mc/edit.indent.rc which is copied to
.mc/cedit/edit.indent.rc in your home directory the first time you use
it.
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.
Options of editor in ini-file
In this section described some options in ini-file. Options placed in
'[Midnight Commander]' section
editor_wordcompletion_collect_entire_file
Search autocomplete candidates in entire of file or just from
begin of file to cursor position (0)
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 built-in commands as well) in turn. If
none of these matches, 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 Complete: show all
option in the Configuration dialog. If it is enabled, 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
Alt-Tab again, only the subset will be shown in the listbox, otherwise
the first item which matches all the previous characters will be high-
lighted. 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 Complete: show all is disabled, the dialog pops up only if you press
Alt-Tab for the second time, for the first time MC just beeps.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 38
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)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 manipu-
late files not located on the Unix file system.
Currently the Midnight Commander is packaged with some 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 sys-
tems (the default file system for Linux systems), fish (for manipulat-
ing files over shell connections such as rsh and ssh) and finally the
mcfs (Midnight Commander file system), a network based file system. If
the code was compiled with smbfs support, you can manipulate files on
remote systems with the SMB (CIFS) protocol.
A generic extfs (EXTernal virtual File System) is provided in order to
easily expand VFS capabilities using scripts and external software.
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 FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to manipulate files on remote
machines. To actually use it, you can use the FTP link item in the
menu or directly change your current directory 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, the Midnight Commander will login to the remote
machine as that user, otherwise it will use anonymous login or the
login name from the ~/.netrc file. The optional pass element is the
password used for the connection. Using the password in the VFS direc-
tory name is not recommended, because it can appear on the screen in
clear text and can be saved to the directory history.
To enable using FTP proxy, prepend ! (an exclamation sign) to the
hostname.
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
Please check the Virtual File System dialog box for ftpfs options.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 39
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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:
/filename.tar#utar/[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:
mc-3.0.tar.gz#utar/mc-3.0/vfs
/ftp/GCC/gcc-2.7.0.tar#utar
The latter specifies the full path of the tar archive.
FIle transfer over SHell filesystem
The fish file system is a network based file system that allows you to
manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local. To use
this, the other side has to either run fish server, or has to have
bash-compatible shell.
To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special
directory which name is in the following format:
/#sh:[user@]machine[:options]/[remote-dir]
The user, options and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
the user element, the Midnight Commander will try to login on the
remote machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
The available options are:
'C' - use compression;
'r' - use rsh instead of ssh;
port - specify the port used by remote server.
If the remote-dir element is present, your current directory on the
remote machine will be set to this one.
Examples:
/#sh:onlyrsh.mx:r/linux/local
/#sh:joe@want.compression.edu:C/private
/#sh:joe@noncompressed.ssh.edu/private
/#sh:joe@somehost.ssh.edu:2222/private
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.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 40
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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, otherwise it will use your login name.
The port element is used when the remote server is running on a special
port (see the mcserv(8) manual page for more information about ports);
finally, if the remote-dir element 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 system available. Recovery
of deleted files is only available 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 special 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 partition of the
first SCSI disk on Linux, you would use the following path name:
/#undel:sda2
It may take a while for the undelfs to load the required information
before you start browsing files there.
SMB File System
The smbfs allows you to manipulate files on remote machines with SMB
(or CIFS) protocol. These include Windows for Workgroups, Windows
9x/ME/XP, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Samba. To actually use it, you
may try to use the panel command "SMB 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:
/#smb:[user@]machine[/service][/remote-dir]
The user, service and remote-dir elements are optional. The user,
domain and password can be specified in an input dialog.
Examples:
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 41
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
/#smb:machine/Share
/#smb:other_machine
/#smb:guest@machine/Public/Irlex
EXTernal File System
extfs allows to integrate numerous features and file types into GNU
Midnight Commander in an easy way, by writing scripts.
Extfs filesystems can be divided into two categories:
1. Stand-alone filesystems, which are not associated with any existing
file. They represent certain system-wide data as a directory tree.
You can invoke them by typing 'cd #fsname' where fsname is an extfs
short name (see below). Examples of such filesystems include audio
(list audio tracks on the CD) or apt (list of all Debian packages in
the system).
For example, to list CD-Audio tracks on your CD-ROM drive, type
cd #audio
2. 'Archive' filesystems (like rpm, patchfs and more), which represent
contents of a file as a directory tree. It can consist of 'real' files
compressed in an archive (urar, rpm) or virtual files, like messages in
a mailbox (mailfs) or parts of a patch (patchfs). To access such
filesystems '#fsname' should be appended to the archive name. Note
that the archive itself can be on another vfs.
For example, to list contents of a zip archive documents.zip type
cd documents.zip#uzip
In many aspects, you could treat extfs like any other directory. For
instance, you can add it to the hotlist or change to it from directory
history. An important limitation is that you cannot invoke shell com-
mands inside extfs, just like any other non-local VFS.
Common extfs scripts included with Midnight Commander are:
a access 'A:' DOS/Windows diskette (cd #a).
apt front end to Debian's APT package management system (cd #apt).
audio audio CD ripping and playing (cd #audio or cd device#audio).
bpp package of Bad Penguin GNU/Linux distribution (cd file.bpp#bpp).
deb package of Debian GNU/Linux distribution (cd file.deb#deb).
dpkg Debian GNU/Linux installed packages (cd #deb).
hp48 view and copy files to/from a HP48 calculator (cd #hp48).
lslR browsing of lslR listings as found on many FTPs (cd
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 42
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
filename#lslR).
mailfs mbox-style mailbox files support (cd mailbox#mailfs).
patchfs
extfs to handle unified and context diffs (cd filename#patchfs).
rpm RPM package (cd filename#rpm).
rpms RPM database management (cd #rpms).
ulha, urar, uzip, uzoo, uar, uha
archivers (cd archive#xxxx where xxxx is one of: ulha, urar,
uzip, uzoo, uar, uha).
You could bind file type/extension to specified extfs as described in
the Extension File Edit section. Here is an example entry for Debian
packages:
regex/.deb$
Open=%cd %p#deb
Colors
The Midnight Commander will try to detect if your terminal supports
color using the terminal database and your terminal 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 COLORTERM, 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
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 informa-
tion 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 section in the initialization file.
In the Colors section, the default color map is loaded from the
base_color variable. You can specify an alternate color map for a ter-
minal by using the terminal name as the key in this section. Example:
[Colors]
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 43
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
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, gauge. Menu colors are:
menunormal, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel, menuinactive. Dialog colors
are: dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus. Help colors are: helpnor-
mal, helpitalic, helpbold, helplink, helpslink. Viewer color is:
viewunderline. Editor colors are: editnormal, editbold, editmarked.
input determines the color of input lines used in query dialogs.
gauge determines the color of the filled part of the progress bar
(gauge), which is used to show the user the progress of file opera-
tions, such as copying.
The dialog boxes use the following colors: dnormal is used for the nor-
mal text, dfocus is the color used for the currently selected compo-
nent, dhotnormal is the color used to differentiate the hotkey color in
normal components, whereas the dhotfocus color is used for the high-
lighted color in the currently selected component.
Menus use the same scheme but uses the menunormal, menusel, menuhot,
menuhotsel and menuinactive tags instead.
Help uses the following colors: helpnormal is used for normal text,
helpitalic is used for text which is emphasized in italic in the manual
page, helpbold is used for text which is emphasized in bold in the man-
ual page, helplink is used for not selected hyperlinks and helpslink is
used for selected hyperlink.
The possible colors are: black, gray, red, brightred, green, bright-
green, brown, yellow, blue, brightblue, magenta, brightmagenta, cyan,
brightcyan, lightgray and white. And there is a special keyword for
transparent background. It is 'default'. The 'default' can only be used
for background color. Example:
[Colors]
base_color=normal=white,default:marked=magenta,default
Skins
You can change the appearance of Midhight Commander. To do this, you
must specify a file that contain descriptions of colors and lines to
draw boxes. Redefining of the colors is entirely compatible with the
assignment of colors, as described in Section Colors.
A skin-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one
found):
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 44
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
1) command line option -S <skin> or --skin=<skin>
2) Environment variable MC_SKIN
3) In config file parameter skin in section [Midnight Commander]
4) File /etc/mc/skins/default.ini
5) File /usr/local/share/mc/skins/default.ini
Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file
may contain the absolute path to the skin-file (with the extension .ini
or without it). Search of skin-file will occur in (to the first one
found):
1) ~/.mc/skins/
2) /etc/mc/skins/
3) /usr/local/share/mc/skins/
For getting extended info, refer to:
Description of section and parameters
Color pair definitions
Draw lines
Compatibility
Description of section and parameters
Section [skin] contain metainfo for skin-file. Parameter description
contain short text about skin.
Section [filehighlight] contain descriptions of color pairs for file-
names highlighting. Name of parameters must be equal to names of sec-
tions into filehighlight.ini file. See Filenames Highlight for getting
more info.
Section [core] describes the elements that are used everywhere.
_default_
Default color pair. Used in all other sections if they not con-
tain color definitions
selected
cursor
marked selected data
markselect
cursor on selected data
gauge color of the filled part of the progress bar
input color of input lines used in query dialogs.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 45
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
reverse
reverse color
Section [dialog] describes the elements that are placed on dialog win-
dows (except error dialogs).
_default_
Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
dfocus Color of active element (in focus)
dhotnormal
Color of hotkeys
dhotfocus
Color of hotkeys in focused element
Section [error] describes the elements that are placed on error dialog
windows
_default_
Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
errdhotnormal
Color of hotkeys
errdhotfocus
Color of hotkeys in focused element
Section [menu] describes the elements that are placed in menu. This
section describes system menu (called by F9) and user-defined menus
(called by F2 in panels and by F11 in editor).
_default_
Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
entry Color of menu items
menuhot
Color of menu hotkeys
menusel
Color of active menu item (in focus)
menuhotsel
Color of menu hotkeys in focused menu item
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 46
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
menuinactive
Color of inactive menu
Section [help] describes the elements that are placed on help window.
_default_
Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
helpitalic
Color pair for element with italic attribute
helpbold
Color pair for element with bold attribute
helplink
Color of links
helpslink
Color of active link (on focus)
Section [editor] describes the colors of elements placed in editor.
_default_
Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not
specified
editbold
Color pair for element with bold attribute
editmarked
Color of selected text
editwhitespace
Color of tabs and trailing spaces highlighting
editlinestate
Color for line state area
Section [viewer] describes the colors of elements placed in viewer.
viewunderline
Color pair for element with underline attribute
Color pair definitions
Any parameter in skin-file contain definition of color pair.
Color pairs described as two colors separated by ';'. First color sets
the foreground color, second color sets background color. One of the
colors may be omitted, in this case color will be taken from default
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 47
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
color pair (global color pair or from default color pair of this sec-
tion).
Example:
[core]
# green on black
_default_=green;black
# green (default) on blue
selected=;blue
# yellow on black (default)
marked=yellow;
Possible colors (names) described in Colors. section.
Draw lines
Lines sets in section [Lines] into skin-file. By default single lines
are used, but you may redefine to usage of any utf-8 symbols (like to
lines, for example).
WARNING!!! When you build Midnight Commander with the Ncurses screen
library usage of drawing lines is limited! Possible only drawing a
single lines. For all questions and comments please contact the devel-
opers of Ncurses.
Descriptions of parameters [Lines]:
lefttop
left-top line fragment.
righttop
right-top line fragment.
centertop
down branch of horizontal line
centerbottom
up branch of horizontal line
leftbottom
left-bottom line fragment
rightbottom
right-bottom line fragment
leftmiddle
right branch of vertical line
rightmiddle
left branch of vertical line
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 48
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
centermiddle
cross of lines
horiz horizontal line
vert vertical line
thinhoriz
thin horizontal line
thinvert
thin vertical line
Compability
Appointment of color by skin-files fully compatible with the appoint-
ment of the colors described in Colors. section.
In this case, reassignment of colors has priority over the skin files
and is complementary.
Filenames Highlight
Section [filehighlight] from current skin-file contain key names as
highlight groups and values as color pairs. Color pairs is documented
into Skins section.
Rules of filenames highlight placed in /usr/local/share/mc/filehigh-
light.ini file (~/.mc/filehighlight.ini). Name of section in this file
must be equal to parameters names into [filehighlight] section (in cur-
rent skin-file)
Keys in these groups:
type file type. if present, all other option ignored
regexp regular expression. If present, 'extensions' option ignored
extensions
list of extensions of files. Separated by ';' sign.
extensions_case
(make sense only with 'extensions' parameter) make 'extensions'
rule case sentitive (true) or not (false).
`type' key may have values:
- FILE (all files)
- FILE_EXE
- DIR (all directories)
- LINK_DIR
- LINK (all links except stale link)
- HARDLINK
- SYMLINK
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 49
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
- STALE_LINK
- DEVICE (all device files)
- DEVICE_BLOCK
- DEVICE_CHAR
- SPECIAL (all special files)
- SPECIAL_SOCKET
- SPECIAL_FIFO
- SPECIAL_DOOR
Special Settings
Most of the settings of the Midnight Commander can be changed from the
menus. However, there are a small number of settings which can only be
changed by editing the setup file.
These variables may be set in your ~/.mc/ini file:
clear_before_exec
By default the Midnight Commander clears the screen before exe-
cuting a command. If you would prefer to see the output of the
command at the bottom of the screen, edit your ~/.mc/ini file
and change the value of the field clear_before_exec to 0.
confirm_view_dir
If you press F3 on a directory, normally MC enters that direc-
tory. If this flag is set to 1, then MC will ask for confirma-
tion before changing the directory if you have files tagged.
ftpfs_retry_seconds
This value is the number of seconds the Midnight Commander will
wait before attempting to reconnect to an FTP server that has
denied the login. If the value is zero, the login will no be
retried.
max_dirt_limit
Specifies how many screen updates can be skipped at most in the
internal file viewer. Normally this value is not significant,
because the code automatically adjusts the number of updates to
skip according to the rate of incoming keystrokes. However, on
very slow machines or terminals with a fast keyboard auto
repeat, a big value can make screen updates too jumpy.
It seems that setting max_dirt_limit to 10 causes the best
behavior, and that is the default value.
mouse_move_pages
Controls whenever scrolling with the mouse is done by pages or
line by line on the panels.
mouse_move_pages_viewer
Controls if scrolling with the mouse is done by pages or line by
line on the internal file viewer.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 50
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
old_esc_mode
By default the Midnight Commander treats the ESC key as a key
prefix (old_esc_mode=0). If this option is set
(old_esc_mode=1), the ESC key will act as a prefix key for one
second, and if no extra keys have arrived, then the ESC key is
interpreted as a cancel key (ESC ESC).
only_leading_plus_minus
Allow special treatment for '+', '-', '*' in the command line
(select, unselect, reverse selection) only if the command line
is empty. You don't need to quote those characters in the mid-
dle of the command line. On the other hand, you cannot use them
to change selection when the command line is not empty.
reverse_files_only
Allow revert selection of files only. This variable is on by
default. If on, the reverse selection is applied to files only,
not to directories. The selection of directories is untouched.
If off, the reverse selection is applied to files as well to
directories: all unselected items become selected, and vice
versa.
panel_scroll_pages
If set (the default), panel will scroll by half the display when
the cursor reaches the end or the beginning of the panel, other-
wise it will just scroll a file at a time.
show_output_starts_shell
This variable only works if you are not using the subshell sup-
port. When you use the C-o keystroke to go back to the user
screen, if this one is set, you will get a fresh shell. Other-
wise, pressing any key will bring you back to the Midnight Com-
mander.
torben_fj_mode
If this flag is set, then the home and end keys will work
slightly different on the panels, instead of moving the selec-
tion to the first and last files in the panels, they will act as
follows:
The home key will: Go up to the middle line, if below it; else
go to the top line unless it is already on the top line, in this
case it will go to the first file in the panel.
The end key has a similar behavior: Go down to the middle line,
if over it; else go to the bottom line unless you already are at
the bottom line, in such case it will move the selection to the
last file name in the panel.
use_file_to_guess_type
If this variable is on (the default) it will spawn the file com-
mand to match the file types listed on the mc.ext file.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 51
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
xtree_mode
If this variable is on (default is off) when you browse the file
system on a Tree panel, it will automatically reload the other
panel with the contents of the selected directory.
fish_directory_timeout
This variable holds the lifetime of a directory cache entry in
seconds. The default value is 900 seconds.
Terminal databases
The Midnight Commander provides a way to fix your system terminal
database without requiring root privileges. The Midnight Commander
searches in the system initialization file (the mc.lib file located in
the Midnight Commander library directory) and in the ~/.mc/ini file for
the section "terminal:your-terminal-name" and then for the section
"terminal:general", each line of the section contains a key symbol that
you want to define, followed by an equal sign and the definition for
the key. You can use the special \e form to represent the escape char-
acter and the ^x to represent the control-x character.
The possible key symbols are:
f0 to f20 Function keys f0-f20
bs backspace
home home key
end end key
up up arrow key
down down arrow key
left left arrow key
right right arrow key
pgdn page down key
pgup page up key
insert the insert character
delete the delete character
complete to do completion
For example, to define the key insert to be the Escape + [ + O + p, you
set this in the ini file:
insert=\e[Op
Also now you can use extended learn keys. For example:
ctrl-alt-right=\e[[1;6C
ctrl-alt-left=\e[[1;6D
This means that ctrl+alt+left sends a \e[[1;6D escape sequence and
therefore Midnight Commander interprets "\e[[1;6D" as Ctrl-Alt-Left.
The complete key symbol represents the escape sequences used to invoke
the completion process, this is invoked with Alt-tab, but you can
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 52
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
define other keys to do the same work (on those keyboard with tons of
nice and unused keys everywhere).
FILES
Full paths below may vary between installations. They are also
affected by the MC_DATADIR environment variable. If it's set, its
value is used instead of /usr/local/share/mc in the paths below.
/usr/local/share/mc/mc.hlp
The help file for the program.
/usr/local/share/mc/mc.ext
The default system-wide extensions file.
~/.mc/bindings
User's own extension, view configuration and edit configuration
file. They override the contents of the system wide files if
present.
/usr/local/share/mc/mc.ini
The default system-wide setup for the Midnight Commander, used
only if the user doesn't have his own ~/.mc/ini file.
/usr/local/share/mc/mc.lib
Global settings for the Midnight Commander. Settings in this
file affect all users, whether they have ~/.mc/ini or not. Cur-
rently, only terminal settings are loaded from mc.lib.
~/.mc/ini
User's own setup. If this file is present then the setup is
loaded from here instead of the system-wide startup file.
/usr/local/share/mc/mc.hint
This file contains the hints displayed by the program.
/usr/local/share/mc/mc.menu
This file contains the default system-wide applications menu.
~/.mc/menu
User's own application menu. If this file is present it is used
instead of the system-wide applications menu.
~/.mc/Tree
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 53
MC(1) GNU Midnight Commander MC(1)
The directory list for the directory tree and tree view fea-
tures.
./.mc.menu
Local user-defined menu. If this file is present, it is used
instead of the home or system-wide applications menu.
LICENSE
This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation. See the built-in
help for details on the License and the lack of warranty.
AVAILABILITY
The latest version of this program can be found at
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mc/.
SEE ALSOed(1), gpm(1), mcserv(8), terminfo(1), view(1), sh(1), bash(1),
tcsh(1), zsh(1).
The Midnight Commander page on the World Wide Web:
http://www.midnight-commander.org/
AUTHORS
Authors and contributors are listed in the AUTHORS file in the source
distribution.
BUGS
See the file TODO in the distribution for information on what remains
to be done.
If you want to report a problem with the program, please send mail to
this address: mc-devel@gnome.org.
Provide a detailed description of the bug, the version of the program
you are running (mc -V displays this information), the operating system
you are running the program on. If the program crashes, we would
appreciate a stack trace.
MC Version 4.7.0-pre1 August 2009 54
