How To Select All Files in A Midnight Commander Panel

By | September 9, 2008

Today my post will be quite short: a simple yet useful keyboard shortcut for mc. Often you need to select all files in a Midnight Commander panel, just like using Ctrl+A in Windows. Mignight commander has another shortcut, that uses mask and allows you to select all the files in a mc panel. Here is your initial view:

And here is what you get after pressing

Alt+Shift+=

“*” appears and you just need to press enter:

As you can see all files are selected and now you’re welcome to do anything you want: copy, move, delete, etc. Hope you’ll find it useful; I’ve never seen this function documented.

6 thoughts on “How To Select All Files in A Midnight Commander Panel

  1. ties

    Perhaps the reason you never saw it documented was because the function is really invoked by pressing ‘+’, ak ‘shift’ + ‘=’ when using your keymap. Which is documented in the user manual.

    Sorry to be a documentation-nazi

  2. ties

    Perhaps the reason you never saw it documented was because the function is really invoked by pressing ‘+’, ak ‘shift’ + ‘=’ when using your keymap. Which is documented in the user manual.

    Sorry to be a documentation-nazi

  3. admin Post author

    Thank you! Really missed this, though mc was one of the first things I’ve learned about Linux.

  4. Robert Mark Bram

    Hmm.. but it only selects files. How do you select all files and folders at once? I.e. NOT by pressing INSERT until you have RSI on that massive folder with hundreds of sub-dirs.. (Yes, I have those. No, I didn’t make them that way. Yes, it is silly.)

    Rob
    :)

  5. Robert Mark Bram

    Hmm.. but it only selects files. How do you select all files and folders at once? I.e. NOT by pressing INSERT until you have RSI on that massive folder with hundreds of sub-dirs.. (Yes, I have those. No, I didn’t make them that way. Yes, it is silly.)

    Rob
    :)

  6. admin Post author

    You may select all directories by entering “*/” in the selection window. You should do this after you have selected the files, then you will be able to “select all”

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