[Contents]
Topics:

  
 DESCRIPTION DESCRIPTION
  
 OPTIONS OPTIONS
  
 Overview Overview
  
 Mouse Support Mouse Support

  
 Keys Keys
    
 Miscellaneous Keys Miscellaneous Keys
    
 Directory Panels Directory Panels
    
 Shell Command Line Shell Command Line
    
 General Movement Keys General Movement Keys
    
 Input Line Keys Input Line Keys

  
 Menu Bar Menu Bar
    
 Left and Right Menus Left and Right Menus
      
 Listing Mode... Listing Mode...
      
 Sort Order... Sort Order...
      
 Filter... Filter...
      
 Reread Reread
    
 File Menu File Menu
      
 Quick cd Quick cd
    
 Command Menu Command Menu
      
 Directory Tree Directory Tree
      
 Find File Find File
      
 External panelize External panelize
      
 Hotlist Hotlist
      
 Extension File Edit Extension File Edit
      
 Background jobs Background jobs
      
 Menu File Edit Menu File Edit
    
 Options Menu Options Menu
      
 Configuration Configuration
      
 Display bits Display bits
      
 Confirmation Confirmation
      
 Learn keys Learn keys
      
 Virtual FS Virtual FS
      
 Layout Layout
      
 Save Setup Save Setup

  
 Executing operating system commands Executing operating system commands
    
 The cd internal command The cd internal command
    
 Macro Substitution Macro Substitution
    
 The subshell support The subshell support
    
 Controlling Midnight Commander Controlling Midnight Commander
  
 Chmod Chmod
  
 Chown Chown
  
 File Operations File Operations
  
 Mask Copy/Rename Mask Copy/Rename
  
 Internal File Viewer Internal File Viewer
  
 Internal File Editor Internal File Editor
  
 Completion Completion
  
 Virtual File System Virtual File System
    
 FTP File System FTP File System
    
 Tar File System Tar File System
    
 Network File System Network File System
    
 Undelete File System Undelete File System
  
 Colors Colors
  
 Special Settings Special Settings
  
 Terminal databases Terminal databases

  
 FILES FILES
  
 AVAILABILITY AVAILABILITY
  
 SEE ALSO SEE ALSO
  
 AUTHORS AUTHORS
  
 BUGS BUGS
  
 License License
  
 QueryBox QueryBox
  
 How to use help How to use help
[DESCRIPTION]
DESCRIPTION

The Midnight Commander is a directory browser/file manager
for Unix-like operating systems.[OPTIONS]
OPTIONS


"-a" Disables the usage of graphic characters for line
drawing.

"-b" Forces black and white display.

"-c" Force color mode, please check the section 
ColorsColors for
more information.

"-C arg" Used to specify a different color set in the
command line. The format of arg is documented in the

ColorsColors section.

"-d" Disables mouse support.

"-f" Displays the compiled-in search paths for Midnight
Commander files.

"-k" Reset softkeys to their default from the
termcap/terminfo database. Only useful on HP terminals
when the function keys don't work.

"-l file"  Save the ftpfs dialog with the server in file.

"-P" At program end, the Midnight Commander will print the
last working directory; this, along with the shell
function below, will allow you to browse through your
directories and automatically move to the last directory
you were in (thanks to Torben Fjerdingstad and Sergey for
contributing this function and the code which implements
this option).

bash and zsh users:

mc ()
{
        MC=/tmp/mc$$-"$RANDOM"
        @prefix@/bin/mc -P "$@" > "$MC"
        cd "`cat $MC`"
        rm "$MC"
        unset MC;
}

tcsh users:
alias mc 'setenv MC `@prefix@/bin/mc -P \!*`; cd $MC; unsetenv MC'

I know the bash function could be shorter for zsh and bash
but the backquotes on bash won't accept your suspension
the program with C-z.

"-s" Turns on the slow terminal mode, in this mode the
program will not draw expensive line drawing characters
and will toggle verbose mode off.

"-t" Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and
terminfo: it makes the Midnight Commander use the value of
the TERMCAP variable for the terminal information instead
of the information on the 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 support).

"-U" Enables the use of the concurrent shell support (only
makes sense if the Midnight Commander was built with the
subshell support set as an optional feature).

"-v file" Enters the internal viewer to view the file
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]
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.Menu Bar 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,Directory Panels the 
Left and Right MenusLeft and Right Menus and the 
File Menu.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 command line you
typed; read the 
Shell Command LineShell Command Line and 
Input Line KeysInput Line Keys
sections to learn more about the command line.

[Mouse Support]
Mouse Support

The Midnight Commander comes with mouse support. It is
activated whenever you are running on an xterm(1) terminal
(it even works if you take a telnet or rlogin connection
to another machine from the xterm) or if you are running
on a Linux console and have the gpm mouse server running.

When you left click on a file in the directory panels,
that file is selected; if you click with the right button,
the file is marked (or unmarked, depending on the previous
state).

Double-clicking on a file will try to execute the command
if it is an executable program; and if the 
extension fileExtension File
Edithas 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 ViewerHelp and the 
Directory
Tree.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/iniSave Setup file and changing the
mouse_repeat_rate parameter.

If you are running the Commander with the mouse support,
you can bypass the Commander and get the default mouse
behavior (cutting and pasting text) by holding down the
Shift key.[]


[Keys]
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 abbreviations:

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 character <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 MenuFile 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 PanelsDirectory 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 LineShell Command Line section list the keys which are
used for entering and editing command lines. Most of these
copy file names and such from the directory panels to the
command line (to avoid excessive typing) or access the
command line history.


Input Line KeysInput Line Keys are used for editing input lines. This
means both the command line and the input lines in the
query dialogs.

[Miscellaneous Keys]
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 the
extension of the selected file name matches one of the
extensions in the 
extensions fileExtension File Edit then the corresponding
command is executed.

C-l. Repaint all the information in the Midnight
Commander.

C-x c. Run the 
ChmodChmod command on a file or on the tagged
files.

C-x o. Run the 
ChownChown 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 panelizeExternal panelize command.

C-x h Run the 
add directory to hotlistHotlist command.

M-!, Executes the Filtered view command, described in the

view command.Internal File Viewer

M-?, Executes the 
Find fileFind File command.

M-c, Pops up the 
quick cdQuick cd dialog.

C-o, When the program is being run in the Linux or SCO
console or under an xterm, it will show you the output of
the previous command. When ran on the Linux console, the
Midnight Commander uses an external program (cons.saver)
to handle saving and restoring of information on the
screen.

When the subshell support is compiled in, you can type C-o
at any time and you will be taken back to the Midnight
Commander main screen, to return to your application just
type C-o. If you have an application suspended by using
this trick, you won't be able to execute other programs
from the Midnight Commander until you terminate the
suspended application.

[Directory Panels]
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.Left and Right Menus

Tab, C-i. Change the current panel. The old other panel
becomes the new current panel and the old current panel
becomes the new other panel. The selection bar moves from
the old current panel to the new current panel.

Insert, C-t. To tag files you may use the Insert key (the
kich1 terminfo sequence) or the C-t (Control-t) sequence.
To untag files, just retag a tagged file.

M-g, M-h (or M-r), M-j. Used to select the top file in a
panel, the middle file and the bottom one, respectively.

C-s, M-s. Start a filename search in the directory
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 letters. The "backspace" or DEL  keys can be used to
correct typing mistakes. If C-s is pressed again, the next
match is searched for.

M-t Toggle the current display listing to show the next
display listing mode. With this it is possible to quickly
switch from long listing to regular listing and the user
defined listing mode.

C-\\ (control-backslash). Show the 
directory hotlistHotlist 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
characters and ? standing for one character). If Shell
Patterns is off, then the tagging of files is done with
normal regular expressions (see ed (1)).

If the expression starts or ends with a slash (/), then it
will select directories instead of files.

\\ (backslash). Use the "\" key to unselect a group of
files. This is the opposite of the Plus key.

up-key, C-p. Move the selection bar to the previous entry
in the panel.

down-key, C-n. Move the selection bar to the next entry in
the panel.

home, a1, M-<. Move the selection bar to the first entry
in the panel.

end, c1, M->. Move the selection bar to the last entry in
the panel.

next-page, C-v. Move the selection bar one page down.

prev-page, M-v. Move the selection bar one page up.

M-o, If the other panel is a listing panel and you are
standing on a directory in the current panel, then the
other panel contents are set to the contents of the
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]
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 
completionCompletion for you.

C-x t, C-x C-t. Copy the tagged files (or if there are no
tagged files, the selected file) of the current panel (C-x
t) or of the other panel (C-x C-t) to the command line.

C-x p, C-x C-p.  The first key sequence copies the current
path name to the command line, and the second one copies
the unselected panel's path name to the command line.

C-q. The quote command can be used to insert characters
that are otherwise interpreted by the Midnight Commander
(like the '+' symbol)

M-p, M-n. Use these keys to browse through the command
history. M-p takes you to the last entry, M-n takes you to
the next one.

M-h. Displays the history for the current input line.

[General Movement Keys]
General Movement Keys

The help viewer, the file viewer and the directory tree
use common code to handle moving. Therefore they accept
exactly the same keys. Each of them also accepts some keys
of its own.

Other parts of the Midnight Commander use some of the same
movement keys, so this section may be of use for those
parts too.

Up, C-p. Moves one line backward.

Down, C-n. Moves one line forward.

Prev Page, Page Up, M-v. Moves one pageful backward.

Next Page, Page Down, C-v. Moves one pageful forward.

Home, A1. Moves to the beginning.

End, C1. Move to the end.

The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following
keys in addition the to ones mentioned above:

b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete. Moves one pageful
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]
Input Line Keys

The input lines (they are used for the 
command lineShell 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 
completionCompletion for you.

[]


[Menu Bar]
Menu Bar

The menu bar pops up when you press F9 or click the mouse
on the top row of the screen. The menu bar has five menus:
"Left", "File", "Command", "Options" and "Right".

The 
Left and Right MenusLeft and Right Menus allow you to modify the
appearance of the left and right directory panels.

The 
File MenuFile Menu lists the actions you can perform on the
currently selected file or the tagged files.

The 
Command MenuCommand 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]
Left and Right Menus

The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from
the "Left" and "Right" menus.

[Listing Mode...]
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 (therefore showing twice as many files as other
views). The long view is similar to the output of "ls -l"
command. The long view takes the whole screen width.

If you choose the "User" display format, then you have to
specify the display format.

The user display format must start with a panel size
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 specifier. This are the available fields you may
display:

name, displays the file name.

size, displays the file size.

bsize, is an alternative form of the <bf/size/ format. It
displays the size of the files and for directories it just
shows SUB-DIR or UP--DIR.

type, displays a one character field type. This character
is a superset of what is displayed by ls with the -F flag.
An asterisk for executable files, a slash for directories,
an at-sign for links, an equal sign for sockets, a hyphen
for character devices, a plus sign for block devices, a
pipe for fifos, a tilde for symbolic links to directories
and an exclamation mark for stalled symlinks (links that
point nowhere).

mtime, file's last modification time.

atime, file's last access time.

ctime, file's creation time.

perm, a string representing the current permission bits of
the file.

mode, an octal value with the current permission bits of
the file.

nlink, the number of links to the file. ngid, the GID
(numeric).

nuid, the UID (numeric).

owner, the owner of the file.

group, the group of the file.

inode, the inode of the file.

Also you may use these field names for arranging the
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
treeDirectory Tree feature. See the section about it for more
information.

"Quick View" In this mode, the panel will switch to a
reduced 
viewerInternal File 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...]
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 menuOptions Menu (option "Mix all
files" ).

[Filter...]
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]
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 panelizeExternal panelize
for more information).

[File Menu]
File Menu

The Midnight Commander uses the F1 - F10 keys as keyboard
shortcuts for commands appearing in the file menu. The
escape sequences for the Fkeys are terminfo capabilities
kf1 trough kf10. On terminals without function key
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 parentheses):

Help (F1)

Invokes the built-in hypertext help viewer. Inside the

help viewer,Help 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.Menu File Edit 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 ViewerInternal 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, or the

Internal File EditorInternal File Editor if the use_internal_edit option is
on.

Copy (F5)

Pop up an input dialog with destination that defaults to
the directory in the non-selected panel and copies the
currently selected file (or the tagged files, if there is
at least one file tagged) to the directory specified by
the user in the input dialog. During this process, you can
press C-c or ESC to abort the operation. For details about
source mask (which will be usually either * or ^\(.*\)$
depending on setting of Use shell patterns) and possible
wildcards in the destination see 
Mask copy/rename.Mask Copy/Rename

On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the
background by clicking on the background button (or
pressing M-b in the dialog box). The 
Background JobsBackground Jobs is
used to control the background process.

Link (C-x l)

Create a hard link to the current file.

SymLink (C-x s)

Create a symbolic link to the current file. To those of
you who don't know what links are: creating a link to a
file is a bit like copying the file, but both the source
filename and the destination filename represent the same
file image. For example, if you edit one of these files,
all changes you make will appear in both files. Some
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 Commander shows an
"@"-sign in front of the file name if it is a symbolic
link to somewhere (except to directory, where it shows a
tilde (~)). The original file which the link points to is
shown on mini-status line if the "Show mini-status" option
is enabled. Use symbolic links when you want to avoid the
confusion that can be caused by hard links.

Rename/Move (F6)

Pop up an input dialog that defaults to the directory in
the non-selected panel and moves the currently selected
file (or the tagged files if there is at least one tagged
file) to the directory specified by the user in the input
dialog. During the process, you can press C-c or ESC to
abort the operation. For more details look at Copy
operation above, most of the things are quite similar.

On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the
background by clicking on the background button (or
pressing M-b in the dialog box). The 
Background JobsBackground 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.

Quick cd (M-c) Use the 
quick cdQuick 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]
Quick cd

This command is useful if you have a full command line and
want to 
cdThe cd internal command somewhere without having to yank and paste
the command line. This command pops up a small dialog,
where you enter everything you would enter after cd  on
the command line and then you press enter. This features
all the things that are already in the 
internal cd
command.The cd internal command

[Command Menu]
Command Menu

The 
Directory treeDirectory Tree command shows a tree figure of the
directories.

The 
Find fileFind File command allows you to search for a specific
file. The "Swap panels" command swaps the contents of the
two directory panels.

The "Panels on/off" command shows the output of the last
shell command. This works only on xterm and on Linux and
SCO console.

The Compare directories (C-x d) command compares the
directory panels with each other. You can then use the
Copy (F5) command to make the panels identical. There are
three compare methods. The quick method compares only file
size and file date. The thorough method makes a full
byte-by-byte compare. The thorough method is not available
if the machine does not support the mmap(2) system call.
The size-only compare method just compares the file sizes
and does not check the contents or the date times, it just
checks the file size.

The Command history command shows a list of typed
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-\)Hotlist command makes changing of the
current directory to often used directories faster.

The 
External panelizeExternal panelize allows you to execute an external
program, and make the output of that program the contents
of the current panel.


Extension file editExtension 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 editMenu File Edit
command may be used for editing the user menu (which
appears by pressing F2).

[Directory Tree]
Directory Tree

The Directory Tree command shows a tree figure of the
directories. You can select a directory from the figure
and the Midnight Commander will change to that directory.

There are two ways to invoke the tree. The real directory
tree command is available from Commands menu. The other
way is to select tree view from the Left or Right menu.

To get rid of long delays the Midnight Commander creates
the tree figure by scanning only a small subset of all the
directories. If the directory which you want to see is
missing, move to its parent directory and press C-r (or
F2).

You can use the following keys:


General movement keysGeneral 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 subdirectories which don't exist any more.

F3 (Forget). Delete this directory from the tree figure.
Use this to remove clutter from the figure. If you want
the directory back to the tree figure press F2 in its
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 directory, and the Right key to move to a
child directory. Only the parent, sibling and children
directories are shown, others are left out. The tree
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.Mouse Support

[Find File]
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 treeDirectory Tree figure.

The contents field accepts regular expressions similar to
egrep(1). That means you have to escape characters with a
special meaning to egrep with "\", e.g. if you search for
"strcmp (" you will have to input "strcmp \(" (without the
double quotes).

You can start the search by pressing the Ok button. 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
additional operations on them (view, copy, move, delete
and so on). After panelizing you can press C-r to return
to the normal file listing.

It is possible to have a list of directories that the Find
File command should skip during the search (for example,
you may want to avoid searches on a CDROM or on a NFS
directory that is mounted across a slow link).

Directories to be skipped should be set on the variable
find_ignore_dirs  in the Misc  section of your ~/.mc/ini
file.

Directory components should be separated with a colon,
here is an example:

[Misc]
find_ignore_dirs=/cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs

You may consider using the 
External panelizeExternal panelize command for
some operations. Find file command is for simple queries
only, while using External panelize you can do as
mysterious searches as you would like.

[External panelize]
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 panelization 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]
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 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 commandThe cd internal command description.

[Extension File Edit]
Extension File Edit

This will invoke your editor on the file ~/.mc/ext. The
format of this file is as follows (the format has changed
with version 3.0):

All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.

Lines starting in the first column should have following
format:

keyword/descNL, i.e. everything after keyword/ until new
line is desc

keyword can be:

shell (desc is then any extension (no wildcards), i.e.
matches all the files *desc . Example: .tar matches *.tar)

regex (desc is a regular expression)

type (file matches this if `file %f` matches regular
expression desc (the filename: part from `file %f` is
removed))

default (matches any file no matter what desc is)

Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be
of the format:

keyword=commandNL (with no spaces around =), where keyword
should be:

Open (if the user presses Enter or doubleclicks it), View
(F3), Edit (F4), Drop (user drops some files on it) or any
other user defined name (those will be listed in the
extension dependent pop-up menu). Icon name is reserved
for future use by mc.

command is any one-line shell command, with the simple

macro substitution.Macro Substitution

Target are evaluated from top to bottom (order is thus
important). If some actions are missing, search continues
as if this target didn't match (i.e. if a file matches the
first and second entry and View action is missing in the
first one, then on pressing F3 the View action from the
second entry will be used. default should catch all the
actions.

[Background jobs]
Background jobs

This lets you control the state of any background Midnight
Commander process (only copy and move files operations can
be done in the background). You can stop, restart and kill
a background job from here.

[Menu File Edit]
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 @prefix@/lib/mc/mc.menu.

The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that
start with anything but space or tab are considered
entries for the menu (in order to be able to use it like a
hot key, the first character should be a letter). All the
lines that start with a space or a tab are the commands
that will be executed when the entry is selected.

When an option is selected all the command lines of the
option are copied to a temporary file in the temporary
directory (usually /usr/tmp) and then that file is
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.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]
Options Menu

The 
ConfigurationConfiguration command pops up a dialog from which you
can change most of settings of the Midnight Commander.

The 
Display bitsDisplay bits command pops up a dialog from which you
may select which characters is your terminal able to
display.

The 
ConfirmationConfirmation command pops up a dialog from which you
specify which actions you want to confirm.

The 
Learn keysLearn 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 FSVirtual FS command pops up a dialog from which you
specify some VFS related options.

The 
LayoutLayout command pops up a dialog from which you specify
a bunch of options how mc looks like on the screen.

The 
Save setupSave Setup command saves the current settings of the
Left, Right and Options menus. A small number of other
settings is saved, too.

[Configuration]
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.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 command. If you are using the Linux or
SCO console or an xterm, you will be able to see the
output of the command by typing C-o. "On dumb terminals"
You will get the pause message on terminals that are not
capable of showing the 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.

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 editor is used to edit files. If the option
is disabled, the editor specified in the EDITOR
environment variable is used. If no editor is specified,
vi is used. See the section on the 
internal file editor.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.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 directory either in the panels, or using
the cd command. This is the default behavior of bash. When
unset, the Midnight Commander follows the real directory
structure, so cd .. if you've entered that directory
through a link will move you to the current directory's
real parent and not to the directory where the link was
present.

[Display bits]
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]
Confirmation

In this menu you configure the confirmation options for
file deletion, overwriting, execution by pressing enter
and quitting the program.

[Learn keys]
Learn keys

This dialog lets you test if your keys F1-F20, Home, End,
etc. work properly on your terminal. They often don't,
since many terminal databases are broken.

You can move around with the Tab key, with the vi moving
keys ('h' left, 'j' down, 'k' up and 'l' right) and after
you press any arrow key once (this will mark it OK), then
you can use that key as well.

You test them just by pressing each of them. As soon as
you press a key and the key works properly, OK should
appear next to the name of that key. Once a key is marked
OK it starts to work as usually, e.g. F1 for the first
time will just check that F1 works OK, but from that time
on it will show help. The same applies to the arrow keys.
Tab key should be working always.

If some keys do not work properly, then you won't see OK
after the key name after you have pressed that key. You
may then want to fix it. You do it by pressing the button
of that key (either by mouse or using Tab and Enter). Then
a red message will appear and you will be asked to type
that key. If you want to abort this, press just Esc and
wait until the message disappears. Otherwise type the key
you're asked to type and also wait until the dialog
disappears.

When you finish with all the keys, you may want either to
Save your key fixes into your ~/.mc/ini file into the
[terminal:TERM] section (where TERM is the name of your
current terminal) or to discard them. If all your keys
were working properly and you had not to fix any key, then
(of course) no saving will occur.

[Virtual FS]
Virtual FS

This option gives you control over the settings of the

Virtual File System Virtual File System information cache.

The Midnight Commander keeps in memory the information
related to some of the virtual file systems to speed up
the access to the files in the file system. Since the
information that must be kept may be large (for example,
compressed tar files may be kept in RAM for faster
access), you may want to tune the parameters of the cached
information to decrease your memory usage or to maximize
the speed of access to frequently used file systems.

The Tar file system is quite clever about how it handles
tar files: it just loads the directory entries and when it
needs to use the information contained in the tar file, it
goes and grab it.

In the wild, tar files are usually kept compressed (plain
tar files are species in extinction), and because of the
nature of those files (the directory entries for the tar
files is not there waiting for us to be loaded), the tar
file system has two choices: load the complete,
uncompressed 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 compressed tar files you will tolerate to load
into your precious memory. The default setting is set to
one megabyte, this means that compressed tar files whose
size is at most one megabyte will be loaded into core,
otherwise a temporary uncompressed tar file will be
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 number you typed in, use 'k' for kilobyte and 'm'
for megabyte. Our routine does not accept floating point
numbers, so you can't use ".5 m" to specify 512 kilobytes,
you will have to use "512 k" instead.

Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all
over the disk, it's common that you will leave a tar file
and the re-enter it later. Since uncompression is slow,
the Midnight Commander will cache the information in
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]
Layout

The layout dialog gives you a possibility to change the
general layout of screen. You can specify whether the
menubar, the command prompt, the hintbar and the function
keybar are visible. On the Linux or SCO console you can
specify how many lines are shown in the output window.

The rest of the screen area is used for the two directory
panels. You can specify whether the area is split to the
panels in vertical or horizontal direction. The split can
be equal or you can specify an unequal split.

[Save Setup]
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
@prefix@/lib/mc/mc.ini. If the system-wide configuration
file doesn't exist, MC uses the default settings.

The Save Setup command creates the ~/.mc/ini file by
saving the current settings of the 
Left, RightLeft and Right Menus and

OptionsOptions Menu 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
SettingsSpecial Settings for more information.

[]


[Executing operating system commands]
Executing operating system commands

You may execute commands by typing them directly in the
Midnight Commander'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 extensions in the 
Extensions File.Extension File Edit If a
match is found then the code associated with that
extension is executed. A very simple 
macro expansionMacro Substitution
takes place before executing the command.

[The cd internal 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 directory, if you append a username after the tilde,
then it will be substituted with the login directory of
the the specified user.

For example, ~guest is the home directory for the user
guest, while ~/guest is the directory guest in your home
directory.

Previous directory You can jump to the directory you were
previously by using the special directory name '-' like
this: cd -

CDPATH directories If the directory specified to the cd 
command is not in the current directory, then The Midnight
Commander uses the value in the environment variable
CDPATH to search for the directory in any of the named
directories.

For example you could set your CDPATH variable to
~/src:/usr/src, allowing you to change your directory to
any of the directories inside the ~/src and /usr/src
directories, from any place in the file system by using
it's relative name (for example cd linux could take you to
/usr/src/linux).

[Macro Substitution]
Macro Substitution


When accessing a 
user menu, Menu File Edit or executing an 
extension
dependent command,Extension File Edit 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,Extension File Edit 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.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 commands for making the text
bold or underlined.

"%%" The % character

"%{some text}" Prompt for the substitution. An input box
is shown and the text inside the braces is used as a
prompt. The macro is substituted by the text typed by the
user. The user can press ESC or F10 to cancel. This macro
doesn't work on the command line yet.

[The subshell support]
The subshell support

The subshell support is a compile time option, that works
with the shells: bash, tcsh and zsh.

When the subshell code is activated the Midnight Commander
will spawn a concurrent copy of your shell (the one
defined in the SHELL variable and if it is not defined,
then the one in the /etc/passwd file) and run it in a
pseudo terminal, instead of invoking a new shell each time
you execute a command, the command will be passed to the
subshell as if you had typed it. This also allows you to
change the environment variables, use shell functions and
define aliases that are valid until you quit the Midnight
Commander.

If you are using bash you can specify startup commands for
the subshell in your ~/.mc/bashrc file and special
keyboard maps in the ~/.mc/inputrc file. tcsh  users may
specify startup commands in the ~/.mc/tcshrc file.

When the subshell code is used, you can suspend
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 external
commands until you quit the application you interrupted.

An extra added feature of using the subshell is that the
prompt displayed by the Midnight Commander is the same
prompt that you are currently using in your shell.

The OPTIONS section has more information on how you can
control the subshell code.

[Controlling Midnight Commander]
Controlling Midnight Commander

The Midnight Commander defines an environment variable
MC_CONTROL_FILE. The commands executed by MC may give
instructions to MC by writing to the file specified by
this variable. This is only available if you compiled your
copy of the Midnight Commander with the WANT_PARSE option.

The following instructions are supported.

clear_tags		Clear all tags.
tag <filename>		Tag specified file.
untag <filename>	Untag specified file.
select <filename>	Move pointer to file.
change_panel		Switch between panels.
cd <path>		Change directory.

If the first letter of the instruction is in lower case it
operates on the current panel. If the letter is in upper
case the instruction operates on the other panel. The
additional letters must be in lower case. Instructions
must be separated by exactly one space, tab or newline.
The instructions don't work in the Info, Tree and Quick
views. The first error causes the rest to be ignored.

[Chmod]
Chmod

The Chmod window is used to change the attribute bits in a
group of files and directories. It can be invoked with the
C-x c key combination.

The Chmod window has two parts - Permissions and File

In the File section are displayed the name of the file or
directory and its permissions in octal form, as well as
its owner and group.

In the Permissions section there is a set of check buttons
which correspond to the file attribute bits. As you change
the attribute bits, you can see the octal value change in
the File section.

To move between the widgets (buttons and check buttons)
use the arrow keys or the Tab key. To change the state of
the check buttons or to select a button use Space. You can
also use the hotkeys on the buttons to quickly 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]
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]
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 button 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 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]
Mask Copy/Rename

The copy/move operations lets you translate the names of
files in an easy way. To do it, you have to specify the
correct source mask and usually in the trailing part of
the destination specify some wildcards. All the files
matching the source mask are copied/renamed according to
the target mask. If there are tagged files, only the
tagged files matching the source mask are renamed.

There are other option which you can set:

Follow links tells whether make the symlinks and hardlinks
in the source directory (recursively in subdirectories)
new links in the target directory or whether would you
like to copy their content.

Dive into subdirs tells what to do if in the target
directory exists a directory with the same name as the
file/directory being copied. The default action is to copy
it's content into that directory, by enabling this you can
copy the source directory 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 not set), mc would copy it exactly into /bla/foo.
By enabling this option you will copy the content into
/bla/foo/foo, because the directory already exists.

Preserve attributes tells whether to preserve the original
files' permissions, timestamps and if you are root whether
to preserve the original files' UID and GID. If this
option is not set the current value of the umask will be
respected.

"Use shell patterns on"

When the shell patterns option is on you can use the '*'
and '?' wildcards in the source mask. They work like they
do in the shell. In the target mask only the '*' and
'\<digit>' wildcards are allowed. The first '*' wildcard
in the target mask corresponds to the first wildcard group
in the source mask, the second '*' corresponds to the
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
similar 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' 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 backslash and '\*' is an asterisk.

[Internal File Viewer]
Internal File Viewer

The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII
and hex. To toggle between modes, use the F4 key. If you
have the GNU gzip program installed, it will be used to
automatically decompress the files on demand.

The viewer will try to use the best method provided by
your system or the file type to display the information.
The internal file viewer will interpret some string
sequences to set the bold and underline attributes, thus
making a pretty display of your files.

When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in
quotes as well as hexadecimal constants.

You can mix quoted text with constants like this: "String"
0xFE 0xBB "more text". Text between constants and quoted
text is just ignored.

Some internal details about the viewer: On systems that
provide the mmap(2) system call, the program maps the file
instead of loading it; if the system does not provide the
mmap(2) system call or the file matches an action that
requires a filter, then the viewer will use it's growing
buffers, thus loading only those parts of the file that
you actually access (this includes compressed files).

Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key
that the Midnight Commander handles in the internal file
viewer.

F1 Invoke the builtin hypertext help viewer.

F2 Toggle the wrap mode.

F4 Toggle the hex mode.

F5 Goto line. This will prompt you for a line number and
will display that line.

F6, /.  Regular expression search.

?, Reverse regular expression search.

F7 Normal search / hex mode search.

C-s. Start normal search if there was no previous search
expression else find next match.

C-r. Start reverse search if there was no previous search
expression else find next match.

n. Find next match.

F8 Toggle Raw/Parsed mode: This will show the file as
found on disk or if a processing filter has been specified
in the mc.ext file, then the output from the filter.
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.

M-r  Toggle the ruler.

It's possible to instruct the file viewer how to display a
file, look at the 
Extension File Edit sectionExtension File Edit[Internal File Editor]
Internal File Editor

The internal file editor provides most of the features of
common full screen editors. It is invoked using F4
provided the use_internal_edit option is set in the
initialization file. It has an extensible file size limit
of sixteen megabytes and edits binary files flawlessly.

The features it presently supports are: Block copy, move,
delete, cut, paste; "key for key undo";  pull-down menus;
file insertion; macro definition; regular expression
search and replace (and our own scanf-printf search and
replace); shift-arrow MSW-MAC text highlighting (for the
linux console only); insert-overwrite toggle; and an
option to pipe text blocks through shell commands like
indent.

The editor is very easy to use and requires no tutoring.
To see what keys do what, just consult the appropriate
pull-down menu. Other keys are: Shift movement keys do
text highlighting. Ctrl-Ins copies to the file
cooledit.clip and  Shift-Ins pastes from cooledit.clip.
Shift-Del  cuts to cooledit.clip,  and Ctrl-Del deletes
highlighted text. The completion key also does a Return
with an automatic indent. Mouse highlighting also works,
and you can override the mouse as usual by holding down
the shift key while dragging the mouse to let normal
terminal 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 cedit/cooledit.macros in your home directory. You can
delete a macro by deleting the appropriate line in this
file.

F19 will format C code when it is highlighted. For this to
work, make an executable file called cedit/edit.indent.rc
in your home directory containing the following:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/indent -kr -pcs ~/cedit/cooledit.block >& /dev/null
cat /dev/null > ~/cedit/cooledit.error

You can use scanf search and replace to search and replace
a C format string. First take a look at the sscanf and
sprintf man pages to see what a format string is and how
it works. An example is as follows: Suppose you want to
replace all occurences of say, an open bracket, three
comma seperated numbers, and a close bracket, with the
word apples,  the third number, the word oranges and then
the second number, I would fill in the Replace dialog box
as follows:

 Enter search string
(%d,%d,%d)
 Enter replace string
apples %d oranges %d
 Enter replacement argument order
3,2

The last line specifies that the third and then the second
number are to be used in place of the first and second.

It is advisable to use this feature with Prompt on replace
on, because a match is thought to be found whenever the
number of arguments found matches the number given, which
is not always a real match. Scanf also treats whitespace
as being elastic. Note that the scanf format % is very
useful for scanning strings, and whitespace.

The editor also displays non-us characters (160+). When
editing binary files, you should set display bits to 7
bits in the options menu to keep the spacing clean.

See also the file README.edit in the source tree for some
more info.

[Completion]
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
position 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_ambiguousSpecial
Settingsvariable in the Initialization file. If it is nonzero, a
list of all possibilities pops up next to the current
position and you can select with the arrow keys and Enter
the correct entry. You can also type the first letters in
which the possibilities differ to move to a subset of all
possibilities and complete as much as possible. If you
press M-Tab again, only the subset will be shown in the
listbox, otherwise the first item which matches all the
previous characters will be highlighted. As soon as there
is no ambiguity, dialog disappears, but you can hide it by
canceling keys Esc, F10 and left and right arrow keys. If

show_all_if_ambiguousSpecial Settings 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]
Virtual File System

The Midnight Commander is provided with a code layer to
access the file system; this code layer is known as the
virtual file system switch. The virtual file system switch
allows the Midnight Commander to manipulate files not
located on the Unix file system.

Currently the Midnight Commander is packaged with five
Virtual File Systems (VFS): the local file system, used
for accessing the regular Unix file system; the ftpfs,
used to manipulate files on remote systems with the FTP
protocol; the tarfs, used to manipulate tar and compressed
tar files; the undelfs, used to recover deleted files on
ext2 file systems (the default file system for Linux
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]
FTP File System

The ftpfs allows you to manipulate files on remote
machines, to actually use it, you may try to use the panel
command FTP link (accessible from the menubar) or you may
directly change your current directory to it using the cd
command to a path name that looks like this:

ftp://[!][user[:pass]@]machine[:port][remote-dir]

The, user, port and remote-dir elements are optional. If
you specify the user element, then the Midnight Commander
will try to logon on the remote machine as that user,
otherwise it will use your login name. The optional pass
element, if present is the password used for the
connection. This use is not recomented (nor keeping this
in your hotlist, unless you set the appropiate permissions
there, and then, it may not be entirely safe anyways).

Examples:

    ftp://ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx/linux/local
    ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages
    ftp://!behind.firewall.edu/pub
    ftp://guest@remote-host.com:40/pub
    ftp://miguel:xxx@server/pub

To connect to sites behind a firewall, you will need to
use the prefix ftp://! (ie, with a bang character after
the double slash) to make the Midnight Commander use a
proxy host for doing the ftp transfer. You can define the
proxy host in the 
Virtual File SystemVirtual FS dialog box.

Another option is to set the ftpfs_always_use_proxy
parameter in the initialization file. This will configure
the program to always use the proxy host. If this variable
is set, the program will do two things: consult the
@prefix@/lib/mc.no_proxy file for lines containing host
names that are local (if the host name starts with a dot,
it is assumed to be a domain) and to assume that any
hostnames without dots in their names are directly
accessible.

If you are using the ftpfs code with a filtering packet
router that does not allow you to use the regular mode of
opening files, you may want to force the program to use
the passive-open mode. To use this, set the
ftpfs_use_passive_connections option.

The Midnight Commander keeps the directory listing in a
cache. The cache expire time is configurable in the

Virtual File System Virtual FS 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]
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 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]
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]
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]
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 information in the terminal
database.

The Midnight Commander provides a way to change the
default colors. Currently the colors are configured using
the environment variable MC_COLOR_TABLE  or the Colors
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 terminal by using the terminal
name as the key in this section. Example:

[Colors]
base_color=
xterm=menu=magenta:marked=,magenta:markselect=,red

The format for the color definition is:

  <keyword>=<foregroundcolor>,<backgroundcolor>:<keyword>= ...

The colors are optional, and the keywords are: normal,
selected, marked, markselect, errors, input, reverse menu,
menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel, gauge; the dialog colors
are: dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus; Help colors
are: helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold, helplink,
helpslink; Viewer color is: viewunderline; Special
highlighting mode: executable, directory, link, device,
special.

The dialog boxes use the following colors: dnormal  is
used for the normal text, dfocus is the color used for the
currently selected component, dhotnormal is the color used
to differentiate the hotkey color in normal components,
whereas the dhotfocus color is used for the highlighted
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 manual 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.

For file type highlighting mode directory specifies the
color in which directories are shown; executable for
executable files; link  is used to represent links; device
for character and block devices; special is for special
files, such as FIFO and IPC sockets; core is for core
files (see also the option highlight_mode at the section
on 
Special Settings).Special Settings

The possible colors are: black, gray, red, brightred,
green, brightgreen, brown, yellow, blue, brightblue,
magenta, brightmagenta, cyan, brightcyan, lightgray and
white.

[Special Settings]
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 executing 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 directory. If this flag is set to 1, then
MC will ask for confirmation 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.

ftpfs_use_passive_connections. This option is by off
default. This makes the ftpfs code use the passive open
mode for transfering files. This is used by people that
are behind a filtering packet router. This option just
works if you are not using an ftp proxy.

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 subdirectory and the shell command
line is empty. By default, this setting 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 quote
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, otherwise 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 configurable.

show_output_starts_shell This variable only works if you
are not using the subshell support. 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. Otherwise, pressing any
key will bring you back to the Midnight Commander.

show_all_if_ambiguous. By default the Midnight Commander
pops up all possible 
completionsCompletion 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 selection 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.

highlight_mode  By default all information on panels
displayed with the same color. If this variable is set to
1, then perm or mode tokens in display format get ability
to show access rights of the user to the shown file.
Appropriate triplet of reading, writing and execution
rights highlighted with the yellow ( selected ) color. In
addition, if the variable is equal to 2, then all lines
are displaying by the color according to their type (see

Colors).Colors Permissions highlighting also works in this mode.

use_file_to_guess_type If this variable is on (the
default) it will spawn the file command to match the file
types listed on the 
mc.ext file.Extension File Edit

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]
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) or 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 character 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]
FILES

@prefix@/lib/mc.hlp The help file for the program.

@prefix@/lib/mc/mc.ext The default system-wide extensions
file.

~/.mc/ext User's own extension, view configuration and
edit configuration file. They override the contents of the
system wide files if present.

@prefix@/lib/mc/mc.ini The default system-wide setup for
the Midnight Commander, used only if the user lacks his
own ~/.mc/ini file.

@prefix@/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.

~/.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.

@prefix@/lib/mc/mc.hint This file contains the hints
(cookies) displayed by the program.

@prefix@/lib/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 The directory list for the directory tree and
tree view features. 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.

Local user-defined menu. If this file is present it is
used instead of the home or system-wide applications menu.

[AVAILABILITY]
AVAILABILITY

The latest version of this program can be found at
ftp.nuclecu.unam.mx in the directory /linux/local and from
Europe at sunsite.mff.cuni.cz in the directory /GNU/mc and
at ftp.teuto.de in the directory /lmb/mc.[SEE ALSO]
SEE ALSO

ed(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://mc.blackdown.org/mc

[AUTHORS]
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@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz), Ching Hui
(mr854307@cs.nthu.edu.tw), Andrej Borsenkow
(borsenkow.msk@sni.de), Norbert Warmuth
(nwarmuth@privat.circular.de), Mauricio Plaza
(mok@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx) and Paul Sheer
(psheer@icon.co.za) are the developers of this package;
Alessandro Rubini (rubini@ipvvis.unipv.it) has been
especially 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 following people
have contributed code and many bug fixes (in alphabetical
order):

Adam Tla/lka (atlka@sunrise.pg.gda.pl), alex@bcs.zp.ua
(Alex I. Tkachenko), 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 Francisco Grigera, Win32
port (j-grigera@usa.net), Juan Jose Ciarlante
(jjciarla@raiz.uncu.edu.ar), Ilya Rybkin
(rybkin@rouge.phys.lsu.edu), Marcelo Roccasalva
(mfroccas@raiz.uncu.edu.ar), Massimo Fontanelli
(MC8737@mclink.it), Pavel Roskin
(pavel.roskin@ecsoft.co.uk), Sergey Ya. Korshunoff
(root@seyko.msk.su), Thomas Pundt
(pundtt@math.uni-muenster.de), Timur Bakeyev
(timur@goff.comtat.kazan.su), Tomasz Cholewo
(tjchol01@mecca.spd.louisville.edu), Torben Fjerdingstad
(torben.fjerdingstad@uni-c.dk), Vadim Sinolitis
(vvs@nsrd.npi.msu.su) and Wim Osterholt
(wim@djo.wtm.tudelft.nl).

[BUGS]
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-bugs@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx.

Provide a detailed description of the bug, the version of
the program you are running (mc -V display this
information), the operating system you are running the
program on and if the program crashes, we would appreciate
a stack trace.

[main]
 lqwqk     k           k     
 x x x .   x     .     x     
 x x x k lqu wqk k lqw tqk n 
 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 
 v   v v mqv v v v mqu v v mj
     qqqqqqCommanderqj 


Version 

This is the main help screen for the GNU Midnight Commander. 

To learn more on how to use the interactive help facility
just tap 
enterHow to use help. You may like to go directly to the
help 
contentsContents.

The Midnight Commander is written by its 
authorsAUTHORS.

The Midnight Commander comes with ABSOLUTELY NO 
WARRANTYWarranty.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute
it under certain 
conditionsLicense.[License]

                GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
                   Version 2, June 1991

 Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation,
Inc. 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim
copies of this license document, but changing it is not
allowed.

                         Preamble

  The licenses for most software are designed to take away
your freedom to share and change it.  By contrast, the GNU
General Public License is intended to guarantee your
freedom to share and change free software--to make sure
the software is free for all its users.  This General
Public License applies to most of the Free Software
Foundation's software and to any other program whose
authors commit to using it.  (Some other Free Software
Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General
Public License instead.)  You can apply it to your
programs, too.

  When we speak of free software, we are referring to
freedom, not price.  Our General Public Licenses are
designed to make sure that you have the freedom to
distribute copies of free software (and charge for this
service if you wish), that you receive source code or can
get it if you want it, that you can change the software or
use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know
you can do these things.

  To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions
that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you
to surrender the rights.  These restrictions translate to
certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies
of the software, or if you modify it.

  For example, if you distribute copies of such a program,
whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients
all the rights that you have.  You must make sure that
they, too, receive or can get the source code.  And you
must show them these terms so they know their rights.

  We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the
software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you
legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the
software.

  Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to
make certain that everyone understands that there is no
warranty for this free software.  If the software is
modified by someone else and passed on, we want its
recipients to know that what they have is not the
original, so that any problems introduced by others will
not reflect on the original authors' reputations.

  Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by
software patents.  We wish to avoid the danger that
redistributors of a free program will individually obtain
patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary.
To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent
must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed
at all.

  The precise terms and conditions for copying,
distribution and modification follow.

                GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
            TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING,
              DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. This License applies to any program or other work
which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder
saying it may be distributed under the terms of this
General Public License.  The "Program", below, refers to
any such program or work, and a "work based on the
Program" means either the Program or any derivative work
under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the
Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with
modifications and/or translated into another language.
(Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation
in the term "modification".)  Each licensee is addressed
as "you".

Activities other than copying, distribution and
modification are not covered by this License; they are
outside its scope.  The act of running the Program is not
restricted, and the output from the Program is covered
only if its contents constitute a work based on the
Program (independent of having been made by running the
Program).  Whether that is true depends on what the
Program does.

  1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the
Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium,
provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish
on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and
disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that
refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty;
and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of
this License along with the Program.

You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring
a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty
protection in exchange for a fee.

  2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or
any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the
Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or
work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you
also meet all of these conditions:

    a) You must cause the modified files to carry
prominent notices stating that you changed the files and
the date of any change.

    b) You must cause any work that you distribute or
publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived
from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a
whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of
this License.

    c) If the modified program normally reads commands
interactively when run, you must cause it, when started
running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way,
to print or display an announcement including an
appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no
warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and
that users may redistribute the program under these
conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of
this License.  (Exception: if the Program itself is
interactive but does not normally print such an
announcement, your work based on the Program is not
required to print an announcement.)

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole.
If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from
the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent
and separate works in themselves, then this License, and
its terms, do not apply to those sections when you
distribute them as separate works.  But when you
distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a
work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole
must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions
for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus
to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights
or contest your rights to work written entirely by you;
rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the
distribution of derivative or collective works based on
the Program.

In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on
the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the
Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium
does not bring the other work under the scope of this
License.

  3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work
based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable
form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided
that you also do one of the following:

    a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding
machine-readable source code, which must be distributed
under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,

    b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at
least three years, to give any third party, for a charge
no more than your cost of physically performing source
distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the
corresponding source code, to be distributed under the
terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily
used for software interchange; or,

    c) Accompany it with the information you received as
to the offer to distribute corresponding source code.
(This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial
distribution and only if you received the program in
object code or executable form with such an offer, in
accord with Subsection b above.)

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the
work for making modifications to it.  For an executable
work, complete source code means all the source code for
all modules it contains, plus any associated interface
definition files, plus the scripts used to control
compilation and installation of the executable.  However,
as a special exception, the source code distributed need
not include anything that is normally distributed (in
either source or binary form) with the major components
(compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on
which the executable runs, unless that component itself
accompanies the executable.

If distribution of executable or object code is made by
offering access to copy from a designated place, then
offering equivalent access to copy the source code from
the same place counts as distribution of the source code,
even though third parties are not compelled to copy the
source along with the object code.

  4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute
the Program except as expressly provided under this
License.  Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify,
sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will
automatically terminate your rights under this License.
However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from
you under this License will not have their licenses
terminated so long as such parties remain in full
compliance.

  5. You are not required to accept this License, since
you have not signed it.  However, nothing else grants you
permission to modify or distribute the Program or its
derivative works.  These actions are prohibited by law if
you do not accept this License.  Therefore, by modifying
or distributing the Program (or any work based on the
Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to
do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying,
distributing or modifying the Program or works based on
it.

  6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work
based on the Program), the recipient automatically
receives a license from the original licensor to copy,
distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms
and conditions.  You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights
granted herein.  You are not responsible for enforcing
compliance by third parties to this License.

  7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or
allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason
(not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on
you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that
contradict the conditions of this License, they do not
excuse you from the conditions of this License.  If you
cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your
obligations under this License and any other pertinent
obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute
the Program at all.  For example, if a patent license
would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the
Program by all those who receive copies directly or
indirectly through you, then the only way you could
satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain
entirely from distribution of the Program.

If any portion of this section is held invalid or
unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the
balance of the section is intended to apply and the
section as a whole is intended to apply in other
circumstances.

It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to
infringe any patents or other property right claims or to
contest validity of any such claims; this section has the
sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free
software distribution system, which is implemented by
public license practices.  Many people have made generous
contributions to the wide range of software distributed
through that system in reliance on consistent application
of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if
he or she is willing to distribute software through any
other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice.

This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is
believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License.

  8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is
restricted in certain countries either by patents or by
copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who
places the Program under this License may add an explicit
geographical distribution limitation excluding those
countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or
among countries not thus excluded.  In such case, this
License incorporates the limitation as if written in the
body of this License.

  9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised
and/or new versions of the General Public License from
time to time.  Such new versions will be similar in spirit
to the present version, but may differ in detail to
address new problems or concerns.

Each version is given a distinguishing version number.  If
the Program specifies a version number of this License
which applies to it and "any later version", you have the
option of following the terms and conditions either of
that version or of any later version published by the Free
Software Foundation.  If the Program does not specify a
version number of this License, you may choose any version
ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

  10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into
other free programs whose distribution conditions are
different, write to the author to ask for permission.  For
software which is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we
sometimes make exceptions for this.  Our decision will be
guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of
all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the
sharing and reuse of software generally.

[Warranty]
                       NO WARRANTY

  11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE,
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT
PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.  EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED
IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES
PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED
TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE
QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU.
SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF
ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

  12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR
AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY
OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM
AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES,
INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR
CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY
TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF
DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED
BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO
OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR
OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGES.

               END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS

      How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs

  If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of
the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to
achieve this is to make it free software which everyone
can redistribute and change under these terms.

  To do so, attach the following notices to the program.
It is safest to attach them to the start of each source
file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty;
and each file should have at least the "copyright" line
and a pointer to where the full notice is found.

<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of 
what it does.>
Copyright (C) 19yy  <name of author>

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will
be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the
implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License
for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General
Public License along with this program; if not, write to
the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave,
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Also add information on how to contact you by electronic
and paper mail.

If the program is interactive, make it output a short
notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:

Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19yy name of author
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
type `show w'.  This is free software, and you are welcome
to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c'
for details.

The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should
show the appropriate parts of the General Public License.
Of course, the commands you use may be called something
other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even be
mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program.

You should also get your employer (if you work as a
programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright
disclaimer" for the program, if necessary.  Here is a
sample; alter the names:

  Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest
in the program `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at
compilers) written by James Hacker.

  <signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989
  Ty Coon, President of Vice

This General Public License does not permit incorporating
your program into proprietary programs.  If your program
is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful
to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library.  If this is what you want to do, use the GNU
Library General Public License instead of this License.

[QueryBox]

In the query dialog box you can use the arrow keys or the
first letter to select an item or click with the mouse on
the button.

[How to use help]

You can use the cursor keys or mouse to navigate in the
help viewer.
Press down arrow to move to the next item or scroll down.
Press up arrow to move to the previous item or scroll up.
Press right arrow to follow the current link.
Press left arrow to go back in the history of nodes that
you have visited.

If you terminal doesn't support the cursor keys you can
use the space bar to scroll forward and the 'b' key scroll
back. Use the TAB key to move to the next item and press
ENTER to follow the current link. The 'l' (last) key may
be used to go back in the history of nodes that you have
visited. Press ESC to exit the help viewer.

The left mouse button will follow the link or scroll. The
right mouse button can be used to go back in the history
of nodes.

The full key list of the help viewer:


General movement keysGeneral Movement Keys are accepted.

tab           Move to the next item.
M-tab         Move to the previous item. 
down          Move to the next item or scroll a line down.
up            Move to the previous item or scroll a line up.
right, enter  Follow the current link.    
left, l       Go back in the history of visited nodes.
F1            Show the help for the help viewer.
n             Go to the next node.
p             Go to the previous node.    
c             Go to the Contents node.    
F10, esc      Exit the help viewer.

Local variables:
fill-column: 58
end: