inconvinient things in midnight commander.
 

1- How can I run something in the background, (say an flv) by a-highlighting it b-F2 c-@ (do something with it) Now if I type something like 'vlc &' vlc will run both '&' and the flv (in separate vlc instances)
Now I don't want that, I wanna type vlc & and run the highlighted flv in the background. Now I could just type its name in the command line and append it with a &, but what if the file name was too long?
I'm asking this, because if you open something, like an flv in the foreground and try to open something else, it willl compalin that the terminal is busy.

2- When I highlight multiple files (say mp3 or flv) and hit enter to execute them, say with vlc, I'll get an instance for vlc running the first file, when it finishes, I'll get another for the 2nd file, etc.
I don't want that, I just want one instant running all the things I choose to run.

Now I found that to be very inconvnient.
Has anybody found a way around them?

Thanks!

In this instance, there are two ways you can handle it. First one - highlight the file you want to play, then enter "vlc ", hit ALT-Enter and add "&" at the end of the command (without any of the quotes, of course...). The ALT-Enter will dump the name of the highlighted file to the command line and followed by a space. You really shouldn't need to worry about the length of the name in that instance.

Second - press F9, then c and e to edit the extention file. Search for video and copy the regex that you see in that section, but adding the extention that you want. For example, I have a Toppfield PVR, and I have MC set to play one of its .rec files by adding this to the bottom of the video section of the extention file:

If I highlight a .rec file and press enter, vlc is started in its own session so I can continue using MC if I need to.


Not sure about this one. I suspect that the only way to make vlc play multiple files in a single instance would be to generate a playlist with the file names in it, and use that to start vlc.

Paul.

@toothandnail: Thanks for the tips, the first one works pretty well. For the 2nd issue, I found that, you could highlight multiple stuff,
and dump their name just like you do with Alt+Enter, but this time, you do Ctrl+x,t. That would dump all the files/dirs you selected, so I would just vlc dumpthem & :)

There's another issue that I managed to find a solution for, is the renaming part, if you press F6 to try to rename something, you'd have to write the whole path again. instead, you just do shift+F6 (or F5 sometimes), and that will give you instant renaming :)