MC (GNU Midnight Commander) missing?

Well this is the first tool I would install on any new server. What is MC? It is a text-mode full-screen file manager. It uses a two panel interface and a subshell for command execution. It includes an internal editor with syntax highlighting and an internal viewer with support for binary files. Also included is Virtual Filesystem (VFS), that allows files on remote systems (e.g. FTP, SSH, SMB servers) and files inside archives to be manipulated like real files.

Even if I consider that MC should be installed by default on any system, for some reason, not all the distributions install it by default. In fact some don’t provide a package for it at all… Here I will show you how easy it can be installed.

Debian As any debian package this is very easy to install. Just use:

aptitude install mc

and you are all set.

RHEL4/Centos4 We can install MC with up2date as long as it is available in the packages (as it is for rhel4, cetos4):

up2date mc

Fedora If you don’t have up2date, we can use yum to retrieve the package:

yum install mc

Others You can always install it from sources on any linux distribution. Still I would prefer to have it in the package system that will provide the advantage of automatically updates. Anyway if anyone is interested on details on how this can be done, just let me know.

On some older distributions like RHEL3 for example the MC package is missing. Update 20060605: In case you are looking on how to install MC on RHEL3, please see this post: “Install Mc (Midnight Commander) on RHEL3/Centos3”.