Geeky Fun: Midnight Commander.
Reader Tim brought up a good point today. He mentioned that one of the command line applications that he’d like to see get more press is Midnight Commander.
I’ve used MC off and on over the years and I’ve always enjoyed it. One of the things I really like about it is its speed. Since it’s a text application (meaning it runs on the command line - even though it has a GUI) it’s really, really fast.
I’ve primarily used MC as an FTP client, but it has a variety or functions. From the Midnight Commander site:
GNU Midnight Commander is a file manager for free operating systems. Like other GNU software, it is written in a portable manner and should compile and run on a wide range of operating systems with some degree of UNIX compatibility.
I think that most distros come with MC installed already, although you may not find it in the menu. The command to run MC is simply mc. If you don’t have it installed, I’d be willing to bet that a quick yum install mc or apt-get install mc will do the trick for you. Failing that, you can download it in many formats from the Midnight Commander site.
Midnight Commander really is a full-featured file manager. It can perform pretty much any file management or FTP function that you can think of, and it does it well.
In today’s world of heavy GUI applications, you may not have a need for a sleek file manager like MC, but just for some geeky fun you might want to give it a try one day.
Thanks, Tim!
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POSTED IN: Geeky Fun
2 opinions for Geeky Fun: Midnight Commander.
Erhard
Jul 2, 2006 at 2:11 am
I use mc sice suse 4.2 and before norton nc on win beside the grafical guis
no gui manager achieves this what mc does
Erhard
Jon
Jul 2, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Totally true - MC rocks. It can be a little intimidating to people who aren’t used to text applications, though.
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