Midnight commander is a text mode application. The main interface consists of panels which display the file system. It is similar to many programs that run on the unix shell. The Midnight Commander is a directory browsing and file manipulation program that provides a flexible, powerful, and convenient set of file and directory operations. It is capable of running on the console.Midnight Commander can also rename groups of files, unlike a number of other file managers that can only rename one file at a time. This is convenient for manipulating large collections of files, e.g. to make them conform to a new naming convention. Midnight Commander can also move files to a different directory at the same time as it renames them.

Midnight commander features include the ability to view the contents of RPM package files and also function as ftp client. It includes a editor as mcedit. Mcedit’s features include syntax highlighting for certain languages, and the ability to work in both ASCII and hex modes.

Steps for installing midnight commander:

Installing prerequisites:

1) pkgconfig is needed to compile glib, a library mc relies on. Download the latest version from its official site. Currently, it’s pkgconfig-0.15.0.tar.gz. Then unpack, compile & install:

- wget http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/releases/pkgconfig-0.15.0.tar.gz
- tar -zxvf pkgconfig-0.15.0.tar.gz
- cd pkgconfig-0.15.0
- ./configure
- make
- make install

2) You’ll also need GNU gettext, which can be found in this folder: gettext-0.13.tar.gz.

- wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/gnu/gettext/gettext-0.13.tar.gz
- tar -xvzf ~/Desktop/gettext-0.13.tar.gz
- cd gettext-0.13/
- ./configure
- make
- sudo make install

3) Install glib With Panther, the only additional library you have to install for mc is reduced to glib. Opening the GTK+ home page, click on the topmost Source link and download the latest .bz2-compressed version of glib from the FTP directory which appears. At the time of writing, this file is called glib-2.2.3.tar.bz2. Compiling and installing it couldn’t be any simpler:

- wget ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.2/glib-2.2.3.tar.bz2
- bunzip2 glib-2.2.3.tar.bz2
- tar -xvf glib-2.2.3.tar
- cd glib-2.2.3
- ./configure
- make
- make install

4) Install mc Compiling is again quite simple, with the one notable exception of the ncurses switch for ./configure, which makes it all work properly with Panther. You might want to experiment with the mc Autoconf script’s other switches for enabling/disabling features; the list of available switches can be read by invoking ./configure –help | less as usual.

- wget http://easynet.linux.tucows.com/files/mc-4.6.1-pre1.tar.gz
- tar -zxvf mc-4.6.1-pre1.tar.gz
- cd mc-4.6.1-pre1/
- ./configure –without-x –with-screen=ncurses
- make
- make install

Now we have successfully installed Midnight Commander from source now just
try the “mc” command on the shell….