mc(1)mc(1)NAMEmc - Visual shell for Unix-like systems.
USAGEmc [-bcCdfhPstuUVx?] [dir1 [dir2]] [-v file]
DESCRIPTION
The Midnight Commander is a directory browser/file manager for Unix-
like operating systems.
OPTIONS-b Forces black and white display.
-c Force color mode, please check the section Colors for more
information.
-C arg Use to specify a different color set in the command line. The
format of arg is documented in the Colors section.
-d Disables mouse support.
-f Displays the compiled-in search paths for Midnight Commander
files.
-l file
Save the ftpfs dialog with the server on file.
-P At program end, the Midnight Commander will print the last work‐
ing directory; this, along with the shell function below, will
allow you to browse through your directories and automatically
move to the last directory you were in (thanks to Torben Fjerd‐
ingstad and Sergey for contributing this function and the code
which implements this option).
bash and zsh users:
mc ()
{
MC=/tmp/mc$$-"$RANDOM"
/usr/local/bin/mc -P "$@" > "$MC"
cd `cat "$MC"`
rm "$MC"
unset MC;
}
tcsh users:
alias mc 'setenv MC `/usr/local/bin/mc -P *`; cd $MC; unsetenv MC'
I know the bash function could be shorter for zsh and bash but the
backquotes on bash won't accept that you suspend the program
with C-z.
-s Turns on the slow terminal mode, in this mode the program will
not draw expensive line drawing characters and will toggle ver‐
bose mode off.
-t Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and terminfo: it
makes the Midnight Commander use the value of the TERMCAP vari‐
able for the terminal information instead of the information on
the system wide terminal database
-u Disables the use of a concurrent shell (only makes sense if the
Midnight Commander has been built with concurrent shell sup‐
port).
-U Enables the use of the concurrent shell support (only makes
sense if the Midnight Commander was built with the subshell sup‐
port set as an optional feature).
-v file
Enters the internal viewer to view the file specified.
-V Displays the version of the program.
-x Forces xterm mode. Used when running on xterm-capable terminals
(two screen modes, and able to send mouse escape sequences).
If specified, the first path name is the directory to show in the
selected panel; the second path name is the 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 bottommost line of the screen is the shell command
line, and the bottom line shows the function key labels. The topmost
line is the menu bar line. The menu bar line may not be visible, but
appears if you click the topmost line with the mouse or press the F9
key.
The Midnight Commander provides a view of two directories at the same
time. One of the panels is the current panel (a selection bar is in the
current panel). Almost all operations take place on the current panel.
Some file operations like Rename and Copy by default use the 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 or rlogin connection to another machine from the xterm) or if
you are running on a Linux console and have the gpm mouse server run‐
ning.
When you left click on a file in the directory panels, that file is
selected; if you click with the right button, the file is marked (or
unmarked, depending on the previous state).
Double-clicking on a file will try to execute the command if it is an
executable program; and if the extension file has a program specified
for the file's extension, the specified program is executed.
Also, it is possible to execute the commands assigned to the function
key labels by clicking on them.
If a mouse button is clicked on the top frame line of the directory
panel, it is scrolled one pageful backward. Correspondingly, a click on
the bottom frame line will cause a scroll of one pageful forward. This
frame line method works also in the Help Viewer and the Directory Tree.
The default auto repeat rate for the mouse buttons is 400 milliseconds.
This may be changed to other values by editing the .mc.ini file and
changing the mouse_repeat_rate parameter.
If you are running the Commander with the mouse support, you can bypass
the Commander and get the default mouse behaviour (cutting and pasting
text) by holding down the Shift key.
Keys
Some commands in the Midnight Commander involve the use of the Control
(sometimes labeled CTRL or CTL) and the Meta (sometimes labeled ALT or
even Compose) keys. In this 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.
M-<chr> means hold the Meta or Alt key down while typing <chr>. If
there is no Meta or Alt key, type ESC, release it, then type the char‐
acter <chr>.
All input lines in the Midnight Commander use an approximation to the
GNU Emacs editor's key bindings.
There are many sections which tell about the keys. The following are
the most important.
The File Menu section documents the keyboard shortcuts for the commands
appearing in the File menu. This section includes the function keys.
Most of these commands perform some action, usually on the selected
file or the tagged files.
The Directory Panels section documents the keys which select a file or
tag files as a target for a later action (the action is usually one
from the file menu).
The Shell Command Line section list the keys which are used for 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.
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 bot‐
tom 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 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.
M-!, Executes the Filtered view command, described in the view command.
M-?, Executes the Find file command.
M-c, Pops up the quick cd dialog.
C-o, When the program is being run in the Linux console or under an
xterm, it will show you the output of the previous command. When ran
on the Linux console, the Midnight Commander uses an external program
(cons.saver) to handle saving and restoring of information on the
screen.
When the subshell support is compiled in, you can type C-o at any time
and you will be taken back to the Midnight Commander main screen, to
return to your application just type C-o. If you have an application
suspended by using this trick, you won't be able to execute other pro‐
grams from the Midnight Commander until you terminate the supended
application.
Directory Panels
This section lists the keys which operate on the directory panels. If
you want to know how to change the appearance of the panels take a look
at the section on Left and Right Menus.
Tab, C-i. Change the current panel. The old other panel becomes the
new current panel and the old current panel becomes the new other
panel. The selection bar moves from the old current panel to the new
current panel.
Insert, C-t. To tag files you may use the Insert key (the kich1 ter‐
minfo sequence) or the C-t (Control-t) sequence. To untag files, just
retag a tagged file.
M-g, M-h (or M-r), M-j. Used to select the top file in a panel, the
middle file and the bottom one, respectively.
C-s, M-s. Start a filename search in the directory listing. When the
search is active the keypresses will be added to the search string
instead of the command line. If the Show mini-status option is enabled
the search string is shown on the mini-status line. When typing, the
selection bar will move to the next file starting with the typed let‐
ters. The backspace or DEL keys can be used to correct typing mistakes.
If C-s is pressed again, the next match is searched for.
C-\ (control-backslash). Show the directory hotlist and change to the
selected directory.
+ (plus). This is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Midnight
Commander will prompt for a regular expression describing the group.
When Shell Patterns are enabled, the regular expression is much like
the regular expressions in the shell (* standing for zero or more char‐
acters and ? standing for one character). If Shell Patterns is off,
then the tagging of files is done with normal regular expressions (see
ed (1)).
If the expression starts or ends with a slash (/), then it will select
directories instead of files.
\ (backslash). Use the "\" key to unselect a group of files. This is
the opposite of the Plus key.
up-key, C-p. Move the selection bar to the previous entry in the
panel.
down-key, C-n. Move the selection bar to the next entry in the panel.
home, a1, M-<. Move the selection bar to the first entry in the panel.
end, c1, M->. Move the selection bar to the last entry in the panel.
next-page, C-v. Move the selection bar one page down.
prev-page, M-v. Move the selection bar one page up.
M-o, If the other panel is a listing panel and you are standing on a
directory in the current panel, then the other panel contents are set
to the contents of the currently selected directory (like Emacs' dired
C-o key) otherwise the other panel contents are set to the parent dir
of the current dir.
C-PageUp, C-PageDown Only when ran on the Linux console: does a chdir
to ".." and to the currently selected directory respectively.
Shell Command Line
This section lists keys which are useful to avoid excessive typing when
entering shell commands.
M-Enter. Copy the currently selected file name to the command line.
C-Enter. Same a M-Enter, this one only works on the Linux console.
M-Tab. Does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname
completion for you.
C-x t, C-x C-t. Copy the tagged files (or if there are no tagged
files, the selected file) of the current panel (C-x t) or of the other
panel (C-x C-t) to the command line.
C-x p, C-x C-p. The first key sequence copies the current path name to
the command line, and the second one copies the unselected panel's path
name to the command line.
C-q. The quote command can be used to insert characters that are oth‐
erwise interpreted by the Midnight Commander (like the '+' symbol)
M-p, M-n. Use these keys to browse through the command history. M-p
takes you to the last entry, M-n takes you to the next one.
General Movement Keys
The help viewer, the file viewer and the directory tree use common code
to handle moving. Therefore they accept exactly the same keys. Each of
them also accepts some keys of its own.
Other parts of the Midnight Commander use some of the same movement
keys, so this section may be of use for those parts too.
Up, C-p. Moves one line backward.
Down, C-n. Moves one line forward.
Prev Page, Page Up, M-v. Moves one pageful backward.
Next Page, Page Down, C-v. Moves one pageful forward.
Home, A1. Moves to the beginning.
End, C1. Move to the end.
The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following keys in addi‐
tion the to ones mentioned above:
b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete. Moves one pageful backward.
Space bar. Moves one pageful forward.
u, d. Moves one half of a page backward or forward.
g, G. Moves to the beginning or to the end.
Input Line Keys
The input lines (they are used for the command line and for the query
dialogs in the program) accept these keys:
C-a puts the cursor at the beginning of line.
C-e puts the cursor at the end of the line.
C-b, move-left move the cursor one position left.
C-f, move-right move the cursor one position right.
M-f moves one word forward.
M-b moves one word backward.
C-h, backspace delete the previous character.
C-d, Delete delete the character in the point (over the cursor).
C-@ sets the mark for cutting.
C-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer
and removes the text from the input line.
M-w copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer.
C-y yanks back the contents of the kill buffer.
C-k kills the text from the cursor to the end of the line.
M-p, M-n Use these keys to browse through the command history. M-p
takes you to the last entry, M-n takes you to the next one.
M-C-h, M-Backspace delete one word backward.
M-Tab does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname 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.
Left and Right Menus
The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from the Left and
Right menus.
Listing Mode...
The listing mode view is used to display a listing of files, there are
four different listing modes available: Full, Brief, Long, and User.
The full directory view shows the file name, the size of the file and
the 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.
type, displays a one character field type. This character is a super‐
set of what is displayed by ls with the -F flag. An asterisk for exe‐
cutable files, a slash for directories, an at-sign for links, an equal
sign for sockets, a hyphen for character devices, a plus sign for block
devices, a pipe for fifos, a tilde for symbolic links to directories
and an exlamation mark for stalled symlinks (links that point nowhere).
mtime, file's last modification time.
atime, file's last access time.
ctime, file's creation time.
perm, a string representing the current permission bits of the file.
mode, an octal value with the current permission bits of the file.
nlink, the number of links to the file. ngid, the GID (numeric).
nuid, the UID (numeric).
owner, the owner of the file.
group, the group of the file.
inode, the inode of the file.
Also you may use these field names for arranging the display:
space, a space in the display format.
mark, An asterisk if the file is tagged, a space if it's not.
|, This character is used to add a vertical line to the display format.
To force one field to a fixed size (a size specifier), you just add a
':' and then the number of characters you want the field to have, if
the number is followed by the symbol '+', then the size specifies the
minimum field size, if the program finds out that there is more space
on the screen, it will then expand this field.
For example, the Full display corresponds to this format:
half type,name,|,size,|,mtime
And the Long display corresponds to this format:
full perm,space,nlink,space,owner,space,group,space,size,space,
mtime,space,name
This is a nice user display format:
half name,|,size:7,|,type,mode:3
Panels may also be set to the following modes:
Info The info view display information related to the currently
selected file and if possible information about the current file
system.
Tree The tree view is quite similar to the directory tree feature.
See the section about it for more information.
Quick View
In this mode, the panel will switch to a reduced viewer that
displays the contents of the currently selected file, if you
select the panel (with the tab key or the mouse), you will have
access to the usual viewer commands.
Sort Order...
The eight sort orders are by name, by extension, by 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 Fkeys
are terminfo capabilities kf1 trough kf10. On terminals without func‐
tion 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 (corre‐
sponding to F1 to F9 and F10 respectively).
The File menu has the following commands (keyboard shortcuts in paren‐
theses):
Help (F1)
Invokes the built-in hypertext help viewer. Inside the help viewer, you
can use the Tab key to select the next link and the Enter key to follow
that link. The keys Space and Backspace are used to move forward and
backward in a help page. Press F1 again to get the full list of
accepted keys.
Menu (F2)
Invoke the user menu. The user menu provides an easy way to provide
users with a menu and add extra features to the Midnight Commander.
View (F3, Shift-F3)
View the currently selected file. By default this invokes the Internal
File Viewer but if the option "Use internal view" is off, it invokes an
external file viewer specified by the PAGER environment variable. If
PAGER is undefined, the "view" command is invoked. If you use Shift-F3
instead, the viewer will be invoked without doing any formatting or pre
processing to the file.
Filtered View (M-!)
this command prompts for a command and it's arguments (the argument
defaults to the currently selected file name), the output from such
command is shown in the internal file viewer.
Edit (F4)
Currently it invokes the "vi" editor or the editor specified in the
EDITOR environment variable.
Copy (F5)
Pop up an input dialog with destination that defaults to the directory
in the non-selected panel and copies the currently selected file (or
the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the direc‐
tory specified by the user in the input dialog. During this process,
you can press C-c or ESC to abort the operation. For details about
source mask (which will be usually either * or ^\(.*\)$ depending on
setting of Use shell patterns) and possible wildcards in the destina‐
tion see Mask copy/rename.
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)
Pop up an input dialog that defaults to the directory in the non-
selected panel and moves the currently selected file (or the tagged
files if there is at least one tagged file) to the directory specified
by the user in the input dialog. During the process, you can press C-c
or ESC to abort the operation. For more details look at Copy operation
above, most of the things are quite similar.
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.
Quick cd (M-c) Use the quick cd command if you have full command line
and want to cd somewhere.
Select group (+)
This is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Midnight Commander
will prompt for a regular expression describing the group. When Shell
Patterns are enabled, the regular expression is much like the filename
globbing in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ?
standing for one character). If Shell Patterns is off, then the tagging
of files is done with normal regular expressions (see ed (1)).
To mark directories instead of files, the expression must start or end
with a '/'.
Unselect group (\)
Used for unselecting a group of files. This is the 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 panels.
The "Panels on/off" command shows the output of the last shell command.
This works only on xterm and on Linux 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 two compare methods. The quick method com‐
pares 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 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 M-p or M-n.
The Directory hotlist (C-\) command makes changing of the current
directory to often used directories faster.
The External panelize allows you to execute an external program, and
make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.
Extension file edit command allows you to specify programs to executed
when you try to execute, view, edit and do a bunch of other thing on
files with certain extensions (filename endings). The Menu file edit
command may be used for editing the user menu (which appears by 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
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, M-s. Search the next directory matching the search string. If
there is no such directory these keys will move one line down.
C-h, Backspace. Delete the last character of the search string.
Any other character. Add the character to the search string and move
to the next directory which starts with these characters. In the tree
view you must first activate the search mode by pressing C-s. The
search string is shown in the mini status line.
The following actions are available only in the directory tree. They
aren't supported in the tree view.
F1 (Help). Invoke the help viewer and show this section.
Esc, F10. Exit the directory tree. Do not change the directory.
The mouse is supported. A double-click behaves like Enter. See also the
section on mouse support.
Find File
The Find File feature first asks for the start directory for the search
and the filename to be searched for. By pressing the Tree button you
can select the start directory from the directory tree figure. 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
panelizing you can press C-r to return to the normal file listing.
It is possible to have a list of directories that the Find File command
should skip during the search (for example, you may want to avoid
searches on a CDROM or on a NFS directory that is mounted across a slow
link).
Directories to be skipped should be set on the variable
find_ignore_dirs in the Misc section of your .mc.ini file.
Directory components should be separated with a colon, here is an exam‐
ple:
[Misc]
find_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 }' < /usr/adm/xferlog
You may want to save often used panelize commands under a descriptive
name, so that you can recall them quickly. You do this by typing the
command on the input line and 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 direc‐
tory corresponding to the selected label. From the hotlist dialog, you
can remove already created label/directory pairs and add new one. For
adding you may want to use a standalone Add to hotlist command (C-x h),
which adds the current directory into the directory hotlist, as well.
The user is prompted for a label for the directory.
This makes cd to often used directories faster. You may consider using
the CDPATH variable as described in internal cd command description.
Extension File Edit
This will invoke your editor on the file ~/.mc.ext. The format of this
file is as follows (the format has changed with version 3.0):
All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.
Lines starting in the first column should have following format:
keyword/descNL, i.e. everything after keyword/ until new line is desc
keyword can be:
shell
(desc is then any extension (no wildcars), i.e. matches all the
files *desc . Example: .tar matches *.tar)
regex
(desc is a regular expression)
type
(file matches this if `file %f` matches regular expression desc
(the filename: part from `file %f` is removed))
default
(matches any file no matter what desc is)
Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be of the for‐
mat:
keyword=commandNL (with no spaces around =), where keyword should be:
Open (if the user presses Enter or doubleclicks it), View (F3), Edit
(F4), Drop (user drops some files on it) or any other user defined name
(those will be listed in the extension dependent pop-up menu). Icon
name is reserved for future use by mc.
command is any one-line shell command, with the simple macro substitu‐
tion.
Target are evaluated from top to bottom (order is thus important). If
some actions are missing, search continues as if this target didn't
match (i.e. if a file matches the first and second entry and View
action is missing in the first one, then on pressing F3 the View action
from the second entry will be used. default should catch all the
actions.
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 is used if it
exists, and otherwise mc uses the default system-wide menu
/usr/local/lib/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
vi /tmp/mail.$$
mail -s "Midnight Commander bug" root < /tmp/mail.$$
M Read mail
emacs -f rmail
N Read Usenet news
emacs -f gnus
H Call the info hypertext browser
info
J Copy current directory to other panel recursively
tar cf - . | (cd %D && tar xvpf -)
K Make a release of the current subdirectory
echo -n "Name of distribution file: "
read tar
ln -s %d `dirname %d`/$tar
cd ..
tar cvhf ${tar}.tar $tar
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
X Extract the contents of a compressed tar file
tar xzvf %f
Default Conditions
Each menu entry may be preceded by a condition. The 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:
f <pattern> current file matching pattern?
F <pattern> other file matching pattern?
d <pattern> current directory matching pattern?
D <pattern> other directory matching pattern?
t <type> current file of type?
T <type> other file of type?
! <sub-cond> negate the result of sub-condition
Pattern is a normal shell pattern or a regular expression, according to
the shell patterns option. You can override the global value of the
shell patterns option by writing "shell_patterns=x" on the first line
of the menu file (where "x" is either 0 or 1).
Type is one or more of the following characters:
n not directory
r regular file
d directory
l link
c char special
b block special
f fifo
s socket
x executable
t tagged
For example 'rlf' means either regular file, link or fifo. The 't' type
is a little special because it acts on the panel instead of the file.
The condition '=t t' is true if there are tagged files in the current
panel and false if not.
If the condition starts with '=?' instead of '=' a debug trace will be
shown whenever the value of the condition is calculated.
The conditions are calculated from left to right. This means
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
is calculated as
( (f *.tar.gz) | (f *.tgz) ) & (t n)
Here is a sample of the use of conditions:
= f *.tar.gz | f *.tgz & t n
L List the contents of a compressed tar-archive
gzip -cd %f | tar xvf -
Addition Conditions
If the condition begins with '+' (or '+?') instead of '=' (or '=?') it
is an addition condition. If the condition is true the menu entry will
be included in the menu. If the condition is false the menu entry will
not be included in the menu.
You can combine default and addition conditions by 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 Configuration command pops up a dialog from which you can change
most of settings of the Midnight Commander.
The Display bits command pops up a dialog from which you may select
which characters is your terminal able to display.
The Confirmation command pops up a dialog from which you specify which
actions you want to confirm.
The Learn keys command pops up a dialog from which you test some keys
which are not working on some terminals and you may fix them.
The Virtual FS command pops up a dialog from which you specify some VFS
related options.
The Layout command pops up a dialog from which you specify a bunch of
options how mc looks like on the screen.
The Save setup command saves the current settings of the Left, Right
and Options menus. A small number of other settings is saved, too.
Configuration
The program has some options that may be toggled on and off from the
Configuration dialog. Options are enabled if they have an asterisk or
"x" in front of them. These options are divided into three groups:
Screen Colors, Panel Options and Other Options.
Screen Colors
You can select whether your display supports color or not. Normally
this information is in the terminfo database. If you want to know how
to change individual colors see the section on Colors.
Panel Options
Show Backup Files. By default the Midnight Commander doesn't show
files ending in '~' (like GNU's ls option -B).
Show Hidden Files. By default the Midnight Commander will show all
files that start with a dot (like ls -a).
Mark moves down. By default when you mark a file (with either C-t or
the Insert key) the selection bar will move down.
Show Mini-Status. If enabled, show one line of status information at
the bottom of the panels about the currently selected item.
Mix all files. When this option is enabled, all files and directories
are shown mixed together. If the option is off, directories (and links
to directories) are shown at the beginning of the listing, and other
files afterwards.
Fast directory reload. This option is off by default. If you activate
the fast reload, the Midnight Commander will use a trick to determine
if the directory contents have changed. The trick is to reload the
directory only if the i-node of the directory has changed; this means
that reloads only happen when files are created or deleted. If what
changes is the i-node for a file in the directory (file size changes,
mode or owner changes, etc) the display is not updated. In these cases,
if you have the option on, you have to rescan the directory manually
(with C-r).
Other Options
Verbose operation. This toggles whether the file Copy, Rename and
Delete operations are verbose (i.e., display a dialog box for each
operation). If you have a slow 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.
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 possible settings for this variable:
Never Means that you do not want to see the output of your com‐
mand. If you are using the Linux 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 con‐
sole).
Always The program will pause after executing all of your com‐
mands.
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 $HOME/.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 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.
Confirm Delete. This option is toggled on by default, and will cause
the Midnight Commander to ask for confirmation when deleting a single
file.
Cd follows links. This option, if set, causes the Midnight Commander
to follow the logical chain of directories when changing current direc‐
tory either in the panels, or using the cd command. This is the default
behaviour 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.
8-bit clean. This option allows use of 8-bit characters. It requires
that curses/ncurses be 8-bit clean. If it isn't, things might look
strange.
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.
Confirmation
In this menu you configure the confirmation options for file deletion,
overwriting and quitting the program.
Learn keys
This dialog lets you test if your keys F1-F20, Home, End, etc. work
properly on your terminal. They often don't, since many terminal data‐
bases are broken.
You can move around with the Tab key, with the vi moving keys ('h'
left, 'j' down, 'k' up and 'l' right) and after you press any arrow key
once (this will mark it OK), then you can use that key as well.
You test them just by pressing each of them. As soon as you press a key
and the key works properly, OK should appear next to the name of that
key. Once a key is marked OK it starts to work as usually, e.g. F1 for
the first time will just check that F1 works OK, but from that time on
it will show help. The same applies to the arrow keys. Tab key should
be working always.
If some keys do not work properly, then you won't see OK after the key
name after you have pressed that key. You may then want to fix it. You
do it by pressing the button of that key (either by mouse or using Tab
and Enter). Then a red message will appear and you will be asked to
type that key. If you want to abort this, press just Esc and wait
until the message disappears. Otherwise type the key you're asked to
type and also wait until the dialog disappears.
When you finish with all the keys, you may want either to Save your key
fixes into your .mc.ini file into the [terminal:TERM] section (where
TERM is the name of your current terminal) or to discard them. If all
your keys were working properly and you had not to fix any key, then
(of course) no saving will occur.
Virtual FS
This option gives you control over the settings of the Virtual File
System information cache.
The Midnight Commander keeps in memory the information related to some
of the virtual file systems to speed up the access to the files in the
file system. Since the information that must be kept may be large (for
example, compressed tar files may be kept in RAM for faster access),
you may want to tune the parameters of the cached information to
decrease your memory usage or to maximize the speed of access to fre‐
quently used file systems.
The Tar file system is quite clever about how it handles tar files: it
just loads the directory entries and when it needs to use the informa‐
tion contained in the tar file, it goes and grab it.
In the wild, tar files are usually kept compressed (plain tar files are
species in extinction), and because of the nature of those files (the
directory entries for the tar files is not there waiting for us to be
loaded), the tar file system has two choices: load the complete, uncom‐
pressed tar file into memory or uncompress the file in the disk in a
temporary location and then access the uncompressed file as a regular
tar file.
In this dialog box you tell the Midnight Commander which sizes for com‐
pressed tar files you will tolerate to load into your precious memory.
The default setting is set to one megabyte, this means that compressed
tar files whose size is at most one megabyte will be loaded into core,
otherwise a temporary uncompressed tar file will be created to access
the contents (all of this is transparent to the user).
The program will let you add a suffix to specify the units of the num‐
ber you typed in, use 'k' for kilobyte and 'm' for megabyte. Our rou‐
tine does not accept floating point numbers, so you can't use ".5 m" to
specify 512 kilobytes, you will have to use "512 k" instead.
Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all over the disk,
it's common that you will leave a tar file and the re-enter it later.
Since uncompression is slow, the Midnight Commander will cache the
information in memory for a limited amount of time, after you hit the
timeout, all of the memory resources associated with the file system
will be freed. The default timeout is set to one minute.
Layout
The layout dialog gives you a possibility to change the general layout
of screen. You can specify whether the menubar, the command prompt, the
hintbar and the function keybar are visible. On the Linux 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.
Save Setup
At startup the Midnight Commander will try to load initialization
information from the $HOME/.mc.ini file. If this file doesn't exist, it
will load the information from the system-wide configuration file,
located in /usr/local/lib/mc/mc.ini. If the system-wide configuration
file doesn't exist, MC uses the default settings.
The Save Setup command creates the $HOME/.mc.ini file by saving the
current settings of the Left, Right and Options menus.
If you activate the auto save setup option, MC will always save the
current settings when exiting.
There also exist settings which can't be changed from the menus. To
change these settings you have to edit the setup file with your
favorite editor. See the section on Special Settings for more 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 substition 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 the specified user.
For example, ~guest is the home directory for the user guest, while
~/guest is the directory guest in your home directory.
Previous directory You can jump to the directory you were previously by
using the special directory name '-' like this: cd -
CDPATH directories If the directory specified to the cd command is not
in the current directory, then The Midnight Commander uses the value in
the environment variable CDPATH to search for the directory in any of
the named directories.
For example you could set your CDPATH variable to ~/src:/usr/src,
allowing you to change your directory to any of the directories inside
the ~/src and /usr/src directories, from any place in the file system
by using it's relative name (for example cd linux could take you to
/usr/src/linux).
Macro Substitution
When accessing a user menu, or executing an extension dependent com‐
mand, or running a command from the command line input, a simple macro
substitution takes place.
The macros are:
%f
The current file name.
%d
The current directory name.
%F
The current file in the unselected panel.
%D
The directory name of the unselected panel.
%t
The currently tagged files.
%T
The tagged files in the unselected panel.
%u and %U
Similar to the %t and %T macros, but in addition the files are
untagged. You can use this macro only once per menu file entry
or extension file entry, because next time there will be no
tagged files.
%s and %S
The selected files: The tagged files if there are any. Otherwise
the current file.
%q
Dropped files. In all places except in the Drop action of the
mc.ext file, this will become a null string, in the Drop action
it will be replaced with a space separated list of files that
were dropped on the file.
%cd
This is a special macro that is used to change the current
directory to the directory specified in front of it. This is
used primarily as an 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; unformated to tell the viewer to not interpret nroff com‐
mands for making the text bold or underlined.
%%
The % character
%{some text}
Prompt for the substitution. An input box is shown and the text
inside the braces is used as a prompt. The macro is substituted
by the text typed by the user. The user can press ESC or F10 to
cancel. This macro doesn't work on the command line yet.
The subshell support
The subshell support is a compile time option, that works with the
shells: bash, tcsh and zsh.
When the subshell code is activated the Midnight Commander will spawn a
concurrent copy of your shell (the one defined in the SHELL variable
and if it is not defined, then the one in the /etc/passwd file) and run
it in a pseudo terminal, instead of invoking a new shell each time you
execute a command, the command will be passed to the subshell as if you
had typed it. This also allows you to change the environment 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.
Controlling Midnight Commander
The Midnight Commander defines an environment variable MC_CONTROL_FILE.
The commands executed by MC may give instructions to MC by writing to
the file specified by this variable. This is only available if you
compiled your copy of the Midnight Commander with the WANT_PARSE
option.
The following instructions are supported.
clear_tags Clear all tags.
tag <filename> Tag specified file.
untag <filename> Untag specified file.
select <filename> Move pointer to file.
change_panel Switch between panels.
cd <path> Change directory.
If the first letter of the instruction is in lower case it operates on
the current panel. If the letter is in upper case the instruction oper‐
ates on the other panel. The additional letters must be in lower case.
Instructions must be separated by exactly one space, tab or newline.
The instructions don't work in the Info, Tree and Quick views. The
first error causes the rest to be ignored.
Chmod
The Chmod window is used to change the attribute bits in a group of
files and directories. It can be invoked with the C-x c key 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.
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 that selection (they are the highlit letters on the
buttons).
To set the attribute bits, use the Enter key.
When working with a group of files or directories, you just click on
the bits you want to set or clear. Once you have selected the bits you
want to change, you select one of the action buttons (Set marked or
Clear marked).
Finally, to set the attributes exactly to those specified, you can use
the [Set all] button, which will act on all the tagged files.
[Marked all] set only marked attributes to all selected files
[Set marked] set marked bits in attributes of all selected files
[Clean marked] clear marked bits in attributes of all selected files
[Set] set the attributes of one file
[Cancel] cancel the Chmod command
Chown
The Chown command is used to change the owner/group of a file. The hot
key for this command is C-x o.
File Operations
When you copy, move or delete files the Midnight Commander shows the
file operations dialog. It shows the files currently being operated on
and there are at most three progress bars. The file bar tells how big
part of the current file has been copied so far. The count bar tells
how many of tagged files have been handled so far. The bytes bar tells
how big part of total size of the tagged files has been handled so far.
If the verbose option is off the file and bytes bars are not shown.
There are two buttons at the bottom of the dialog. 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
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 but‐
ton 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 recur‐
sively, the No button to skip the directory, the alL button to delete
all the directories and the nonE button to skip all the non-empty
directories. You can abort the whole operation by pressing the Abort
button. If you selected the Yes or alL button you will be asked for a
confirmation. Type "yes" only if you are really sure you want to do the
recursive delete.
If you have tagged files and perform an operation on them only the
files on which the operation succeeded are untagged. Failed and skipped
files are left tagged.
Mask Copy/Rename
The copy/move operations lets you translate the names of files in an
easy way. To do it, you have to specify the correct source mask and
usually in the trailing part of the destination specify some wildcards.
All the files matching the source mask are copied/renamed according to
the target mask. If there are tagged files, only the tagged files
matching the source mask are renamed.
There are other option which you can set:
Follow symlinks tells whether make the symlinks in the source directory
(not recursively in subdirectories) new symlinks in the target direc‐
tory or whether would you like to copy their content.
Dive into subdirs tells what to do if in the target directory exists a
directory with the same name as the file/directory being copied. The
default action is to copy it into that directory, by disabling this you
can copy a directory's content into that directory. Perhaps an example
will help:
You want to copy content of a directory foo to /bla/foo, which is an
already existing directory. Normally (when Dive is set), mc would copy
the content into /bla/foo/foo, 'cause the directory already exists. By
disabling this option you will copy it exactly into /bla/foo.
If you are root, you can set Preserve UIDs/GIDs, if you want to get the
same owner and group of new files as the ones of the source files.
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 is 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".
Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c"
will become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is "*.*" and
the destination is "\2.\1".
Use shell patterns off
When the shell patterns option is off the MC doesn't do automatic
grouping anymore. You must use '\(...\)' expressions in the source mask
to specify meaning for the wildcards in the target mask. This is more
flexible but also requires more typing. Otherwise target masks are sim‐
ilar to the situation when the shell patterns option is on.
Two examples:
If the source mask is "^\(.*\)\.tar\.gz$", the destination is
"/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy will
be "/bla/foo.tgz".
Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c"
will become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is
"^\(.*\)\.\(.*\)$" and the destination is "\2.\1".
Case Conversions
You can also change the case of the filenames. If you use '\u' or
uppercase or lowercase correspondingly.
If you use '\U' or '\L' in the target mask the next characters will be
converted to uppercase or lowercase correspondingly up to the next
The '\u' and '\l' are stronger than '\U' and '\L'.
For example, if the source mask is '*' (shell patterns on) or
'^\(.*\)$' (shell patterns off) and the target mask is '\L\u*' the file
names will be converted to have initial upper case and otherwise lower
case.
You can also use '\' as a quote character. For example, '\\' is a back‐
slash and '\*' is an asterisk.
Internal File Viewer
The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII and hex. To
toggle between modes, use the F4 key. If you have the GNU gzip program
installed, it will be used to automatically decompress the files on
demand.
The viewer will try to use the best method provided by your system or
the file type to display the information. The internal file viewer
will interpret some string sequences to set the bold and underline
attributes, thus making a pretty display of your files.
When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in quotes as well as
hexadecimal constants.
You can mix quoted text with constants like this: "String" 0xFE 0xBB
"more text". Text between constants and quoted text is just ignored.
Some internal details about the viewer: On systems that provide the
mmap(2) system call, the program maps the file instead of loading it;
if the system does not provide the mmap(2) system call or the file
matches an action that requires a filter, then the viewer will use it's
growing buffers, thus loading only those parts of the file that you
actually access (this includes compressed files).
Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key that the Mid‐
night Commander handles in the internal file viewer.
F1 Invoke the builtin hypertext help viewer.
F2 Toggle the wrap mode.
F4 Toggle the hex mode.
F5 Goto line. This will prompt you for a line number and will display
that line.
F6, /. Regular expression search.
?, Reverse regular expression search.
F7 Normal search / hex mode search.
C-s. Start normal search if there was no previous search expression
else find next match.
C-r. Start reverse search if there was no previous search expression
else find next match.
n. Find next match.
F8 Toggle Raw/Parsed mode: This will show the file as found on disk or
if a processing filter has been specified in the mc.ext file, then the
output from the filter. 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, M-v, C-b, backspace. Scroll one page backward.
down-key Scroll one line forward.
up-key Scroll one line backward.
C-l Refresh the screen.
! Spawn a shell in the currently working directory.
[n] m Set the mark n.
[n] r Jump to the mark n.
C-f Jump to the next file.
C-b Jump to the previous file.
It's possible to instruct the file viewer how to display a file, look
at the Extension File Edit section
Completion
Let the Midnight Commander type for you.
Attempt to perform completion on the text before current position. MC
attempts completion treating the text as variable (if the text begins
with $ ), username (if the text begins with ~ ), hostname (if the text
begins with @ ) or command (if you are on the command line in the posi‐
tion where you might type a command, possible completions then include
shell reserved words and shell builtin commands as well) in turn. If
none of these produces a match, filename completion is attempted.
Filename, username, variable and hostname completion works on all input
lines, command completion is command line specific. If the completion
is ambiguous (there are more different possibilities), MC beeps and the
following action depends on the setting of the show_all_if_ambiguous
variable in the Initialization file. If it is nonzero, a list of all
possibilities pops up next to the current position and you can select
with the arrow keys and Enter the correct entry. You can also type the
first letters in which the possibilities differ to move to a subset of
all possibilities and complete as much as possible. If you press M-Tab
again, only the subset will be shown in the listbox, otherwise the
first item which matches all the previous characters will be 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 show_all_if_ambiguous is set to zero, the dialog pops up only if you
press M-Tab for the second time, for the first time MC just beeps.
Virtual File System
The Midnight Commander is provided with a code layer to access the file
system; this code layer is known as the virtual file system switch.
The virtual file system switch allows the Midnight Commander to manipu‐
late files not located on the Unix file system.
Currently the Midnight Commander is packaged with five Virtual File
Systems (VFS): the local file system, used for accessing the regular
Unix file system; the ftpfs, used to manipulate files on remote systems
with the FTP protocol; the tarfs, used to manipulate tar and compressed
tar files; the undelfs, used to recover deleted files on ext2 file sys‐
tems (the default file system for Linux systems) and finally the mcfs
(Midnight Commander file system), a network based file system.
The VFS switch code will interpret all of the path names used and will
forward them to the correct file system, the formats used for each one
of the file systems is described later in their own section.
FTP File System
The ftpfs allows you to manipulate files on remote machines, to actu‐
ally use it, you may try to use the panel command FTP link (accesible
from the menubar) or you may directly change your current directory to
it using the cd command to a path name that looks like this:
ftp://[user@]machine[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
mremote machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
Examples:
ftp://ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx/linux/local
ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages
The Midnight Commander keeps the directory listing in a cache. The
cache expire time is configurable in the Virtual File System dialog
box. This has the funny behavior that even if you make changes to a
directory, they will not be reflected in the directory listing until
you force a cache reload with the C-r key. This is a feature (when you
think it's a bug, think about manipulating files on the other side of
the Atlantic with ftpfs).
Tar File System
The tar file system provides you with read-only access to your tar
files and compressed tar files by using the chdir command. To change
your directory to a tar file, you change your current directory to the
tar file by using the following syntax:
tar:filename.tar[dir-inside-tar]
The mc.ext file already provides a shortcut for tar files, this means
that usually you just point to a tar file and press return to enter
into the tar file, see the Extension File Edit section for details on
how this is done.
Examples:
tar:mc-3.0.tar.gz/mc-3.0/vfs
tar:/ftp/GCC/gcc-2.7.0.tar
The latter specifies the full path of the tar archive.
Network File System
The Midnight Commander file system is a network base file system that
allows you to manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were
local. To use this, the remote machine must be running the mcserv(8)
server program.
To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir into a special
directory which name is in the following format:
mc:[user@]machine[:port][remote-dir]
The, user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If you specify
the user element then the Midnight Commander will try to logon on the
remote machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
The port element is used when the remote machine running on a special
port (see the mcserv(8) manual page for more information about ports);
finally, if the remote-dir 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:/dev/sda2
It may take a while for the undelfs to load the required information
before you start browsing files there.
Colors
The Midnight Commander will try to detect if your terminal supports
color using the terminal database and your 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.
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]
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, reverse menu, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel,
gauge; the dialog colors are: dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus;
Help colors are: helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold, helplink, helpslink;
Viewer color is: viewunderline.
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 menu, menusel, menuhot and
menuhotsel 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.
gauge determines color of filled part of the progress bar (gauge),
which shows how many percent of files were copied etc. in a graphical
way.
The possible colors are: black, red, green, brightgreen, brown, yellow,
blue, brightblue, magenta, brightmagenta, cyan, brightcyan, lightgray
and white.
If you are setting the colors from your private setup, you could use
this format:
colors=menu=magenta:marked=,magenta:markselect=,red
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 $HOME/.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.
drop_menus.
If this variable is set, when you press the F9 key, the pull
down menus will be activated, else, you will only be presented
with the menu title, and you will have to select the entry with
the arrow keys or the first letter and from there select your
option in the menu.
ftpfs_retry_seconds.
This value is the number of seconds the Midnight Commander will
wait before attempting a reconnection to an ftp server that has
denied the login. If the value is zero, the the program will
not retry the login.
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 keypresses. 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.
navigate_with_arrows.
If this setting is turned on, then you may use the arrows keys
to automatically chdir if the current selection is a subdirec‐
tory and the shell command line is empty. By default, this set‐
ting is off.
nice_rotating_dash
When on, this flag causes the commander to show a rotating dash
as a work in progress indicator.
old_esc_mode
By default the Midnight Commander treats the ESC key as a key
prefix (old_esc_mode=0), if you set this option
(old_esc_mode=1), then 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
set special treatment for '+', '-', '*' in command line (select,
unselect, reverse selection) only if command line is empty. No
need to qoute this characters in the middle of the command line.
But we can not change selection when command line is not empty.
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.
preserve_uidgid
If this option is set (the default), when logged in as root the
default will be to preserve the UID and the GID of files. Some
users prefer to disable this option, so that's why it's config‐
urable.
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.
show_all_if_ambiguous.
By default the Midnight Commander pops up all possible comple‐
tions if the completion is ambiguous if you press M-Tab for the
second time, for the first time it just completes as much as
possible and in the case of ambiguity beeps. If you want to see
all the possible completions already after the first M-Tab
pressing, set this option to 1.
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.
xterm_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.
Terminal databases
The Midnight Commander provides a way to fix your system terminal data‐
base without requiring root privileges. The Midnight Commander
searches in the system initialization file (the mc.lib file located in
the Midnight Commander library directory) or in the $HOME/.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
The complete key symbol represents the escape sequences used to invoke
the completion process, this is invoked with M-tab, but you can define
other keys to do the same work (on those keyboard with tons of nice and
unused keys everywhere).
FILES
/usr/local/lib/mc.hlp
The help file for the program.
/usr/local/lib/mc/mc.ext
The default system-wide extensions file.
$HOME/.mc.ext
User's own extension, view configuration and edit configuration
file. They override the contents of the system wide files if
present.
/usr/local/lib/mc/mc.ini
The default system-wide setup for the Midnight Commander, used
only if the user lacks his own ~/.mc.ini file.
/usr/local/lib/mc/mc.lib
Global settings for the Midnight Commander. Settings in this
file are global to any Midnight Commander, it is useful to
define site-global terminal settings.
$HOME/.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/lib/mc/mc.hint
This file contains the hints (cookies) displayed by the program.
/usr/local/lib/mc/mc.menu
This file contains the default system-wide applications menu.
$HOME/.mc.menu
User's own application menu. If this file is present it is used
instead of the system-wide applications menu.
$HOME/.mc.tree
The directory list for the directory tree and tree view fea‐
tures. Each line is one entry. The lines starting with a slash
are full directory names. The lines starting with a number have
that many characters equal to the previous directory. If you
want you may create this file by giving the command "find /
-type d -print | sort > ~/.mc.tree". Normally there is no sense
in doing it because the Midnight Commander automatically updates
this file for you.
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.nuclecu.unam.mx
in the directory /linux/local and from Europe at ftp.cvut.cz in the
directory /pub/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://stekt.oulu.fi/~jtklehto/mc/
AUTHORS
Miguel de Icaza (miguel@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx), Janne Kukonlehto
(jtklehto@paju.oulu.fi), Radek Doulik (rodo@earn.cvut.cz), Fred
Leeflang (fredl@nebula.ow.org), Dugan Porter (dugan@b011.eunet.es),
Jakub Jelinek (jj@jfch.vc.cvut.cz), Ching Hui (u811563@Oz.nthu.edu.tw),
and Mauricio Plaza (mok@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx) are the developers of
this package; Alessandro Rubini (rubini@ipvvis.unipv.it) has been espe‐
cially helpful debugging and enhancing the program's mouse support,
John Davis (davis@space.mit.edu) also made his S-Lang library available
to us under the GPL and answered my questions about it, and the follow‐
ing people have contributed code and many bug fixes (in alphabetical
order):
Adam Tla/lka (atlka@sunrise.pg.gda.pl), Antonio Palama, DOS port
(palama@posso.dm.unipi.it), Erwin van Eijk (wabbit@corner.iaf.nl), Gerd
Knorr (kraxel@cs.tu-berlin.de), Jean-Daniel Luiset
(luiset@cih.hcuge.ch), Jon Stevens (root@dolphin.csudh.edu), Juan Jose
Ciarlante (jjciarla@raiz.uncu.edu.ar), Ilya Rybkin
(rybkin@rouge.phys.lsu.edu), Marcelo Roccasalva (mfroc‐
cas@raiz.uncu.edu.ar), Massimo Fontanelli (MC8737@mclink.it), Sergey
Ya. Korshunoff (root@seyko.msk.su), Thomas Pundt (pundtt@math.uni-muen‐
ster.de), Torben Fjerdingstad (tfj@olivia.ping.dk), Vadim Sinolitis
(vvs@nsrd.npi.msu.su) and Wim Osterholt (wim@djo.wtm.tudelft.nl).
BUGS
See the file TODO in the distribution for information on what remains
to be done.
26 August 1995 mc(1)
