Professional Documents
Culture Documents
GNU Midnight Commander (mc) is a powerful text based file manager for
Unix. mc gives an jumpstart for Windows power-users who would like to transition to Unix. It also has several
advanced features to keep experienced Unix users happy. mc can run from any Unix terminal. If your terminal can
execute vi, you can execute mc to view the midnight commander user interface. Midnight commander supports mouse
when you are running it under xterm.
mc supports several virtual file systems (VFS) such as, tarfs to view the content of the several archive files (tar, tgz,
bz2, rpm etc.) , ftpfs to browse FTP repositories of a remote server, fish to manipulate files on a remote server over
ssh, undelfs to recover a deleted file.
1. Installation
mc comes with most of the Linux distributions. Verify whether your system already has mc:
# rpm -qa mc
mc-4.6.2-3.pre1.fc9.i386
# yum install mc
# mc -V
GNU Midnight Commander 4.6.1-pre1a
Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, cpiofs, ftpfs, fish, undelfs
With builtin Editor
Using system-installed S-Lang library with terminfo database
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
With support for X11 events
With internationalization support
With multiple codepages support
Note: You can also install mc from source code. Download mc source code from GNU FTP site.
# mc
# mc -a
[Note: If display lines are not drawn properly, use -a]
# mc -c
[Note: Option -c will display mc in color]
Section 1 - Menu bar: Located at the top of the screen and has the following options. Press F9 (or) Esc 9 to access the
menu bar.
Section 2 - Directory panels: Located in the middle and occupies large part of the screen. By default, it displays both
left and right directory browsing panels, where you can view contents of two different directories at the same time.
Section 3 - Function keys: Located at the bottom and has following options. Press Esc key followed by the
corresponding menu number to access these functions.
C-<chr>: Press Control key and a character key at the same time. For e.g. C-u to swap left and right panels.
M-<chr>: Press Alt key and a character key at the same time. For Alt key commands, you can also press ESC
key, release it and press the character key.
S-<chr>: Press Shit key and a character key at the same time.
C-<chr1> <chr2>: Press Control key and a character key at the same time, release it and press another character
key again. For e.g. C-x d to compare directories.
Copy multiple files together using ‘Insert’ and F5: Highlight a file and press ‘Insert’ key to tag the file for
group selection. Repeat this process for multiple files that you wish to copy. Selected files will be displayed in a
different color. Pressing F5 will display the following copy dialog screen, defaulting the destination directory
location to the directory displayed in the other panel
Display additional file information: To display additional file attributes in the directory panels, press F9 ->
Left or Right -> Listing Mode, and select “Full File List”
View the content of any compressed file using F3: Select the file and press F3 to view the content of the file.
For e.g. Select a rpm file and press F3, to view the content of the rpm file.
Toggle between command line and mc using C-o: Press C-o (Control key followed by o) to toggle between
full command-line and mc user interface.
Confirm file operations: To avoid mistakes, enable confirmation for copy, delete, overwrite and execute
functions. Press F9 -> Options -> Confirmations, which will display the following screen.
Additional screenshots of GNU Midnight Commander running both in a terminal and with the GNOME GUI.
Directory listing on right panel and file info on left panel
Browsing an RPM file over FTP with quick view on the left
Internal editor with syntax highlighting editing Perl program
Eye candy - using transparent background in gnome-terminal
Tags: File Manager, GNU, linux file explorer, linux file manager, linux mc command, Linux Windows Explorer, mc,
Midnight Commander