How to install Midnight Commander?
Whats Midnight Commander?
Midnight Commander is Shell application (visual file manager) for SSH like Norton Commander, that older geeks may remember from the time of DOS, or like Total Commander, the most advanced Shell application today.
Why do I need Midnight Commander?
Midnight Commander will help you move more easily trough server files/folders, edit config files, copy/move/delete files/folders/whole directory trees, pack and unpack archives, search for files, run commands in shell… You can also use MC to connect to other server’s FTP and copy files from/to other servers. (can be useful when migrating from one server to another)
How to install Midnight Commander?
The easiest way is using yum or apt-get package menages: all you need to do is execute one command and it will install Midnight Commander and all it’s dependencies
For servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS or Fedora Linux use yum:
yum install mc
For servers running Ubuntu or Debian Linux use apt-get:
apt-get install mc
In case you don’t have a package manager or that this command can’t find MC in it’s repositories you can build it from source:
http://ftp.midnight-commander.org/mc-4.8.21.tar.bz2 tar -xvjf mc-4.8.21.tar.bz2 cd mc-4.8.21 ./configure make make install
(version updated on 1st Dec 2018)
How to start Midnight Commander?
Simply enter mc in terminal and press enter or return button and you should see it running and looking like on the picture below.
If your putty doesn’t look like on the picture above and lines are just some ugly characters: click here and learn how to fix Midnight Commander line drawing.
You can find out more about Midnight Commander at http://www.gnu.org/software/mc/
