On Wed, 8 Jul 2009 09:06:55 +0100 (BST)
"Stephen Rowles" <stephen@???> wrote:
> > right.. having installed midnight commander (never used it before)
> > the following command should work:
> >
> > /bin/bash -c "su - -c mc"
ah! it was the need for a second "-c" that had escaped me
mc is a very useful tool as it will run on a system without X and give
a semi-gui file manager (and more).
I first became acquainted with its parent, Norton Commander, a long
time ago when I bought a 32 meg hard card* that came with dos and a
trial copy of Norton Commander installed on it.
I found I preferred NC to Xtree which I'd been using till then and when
I converted from OS/2 to Linux and found there was a clone of NC I
started using that for all my file management stuff.
Being a poor typist I never managed to learn the skills for doing that
sort of thing in a terminal that people like Adrian seem to have learnt
in the cradle :-)
The thing I like about mc is that you can 'see' what you are doing by
navigating to the relevant directories in each of the two 'panes' then
move or copy the file(s) you have selected in pane A to pane B.
Changing file ownership/permissions is also easy and 'visual' so it is
less easy to make mistakes. You can even use it on remote file
systems.
*a small, by today's standards, hard drive mounted on an expansion
card. It was a huge increase in capacity from the full height 5
meg IBM hard drive that it replaced.
--
John Lewis
using Debian Sid with windowmaker for a nicer desktop
