MC doesn't work like the previous versions, and I'm not sure how to correct it. Running mc in a terminal window always displays the home directory first - try mc / to see this.

afaik is mc allways displaying the directory its run in.. if you run it as root youll most likely see /root.. thats how im used to it.

i can confirm "mc DIR" puts CWD to the first panel and DIR to the second panel. "mc DIR1 DIR2" puts DIR1 to the first panel and DIR2 to the second panel.

Does this help?

Midnight Commander Panel Focus

The way I see it work is whichever pane is active when you exit is the directory you'll be dropped into at the command prompt and the other pane will be saved and reloaded when you start it again. Last active pane will then become the current directory on start up.

So far no one has come up with an answer to my question about mc. I have been using mc in many small scripts to display information such as a listing of Slackware packages. This worked for many years until now.

Previously if I ran rxvt -e mc /var/log/packages, I would get mc opening the package list.
Now it opens my home diretory.

I have several other scripts for slack updating, editing the mirror list, editing the blacklist....

My problem is: mc no longer works the way it used to do. I don't want it to always default to my home directory.

I guess no one else uses mc for rapid opening of directories. It is very handy and quick.

The man page isn't any help at all.

I'm using the previous 'current' package of mc without any problems.

It's a bug:
http://www.midnight-commander.org/ticket/3047

Might be worth trying 4.8.11 when they get around to releasing it.

Thanks for the info.

I have replied that it does NOT default to the home directory. It defaults to the CWD.

I do, but I mostly use "mc . /another/directory/" or "mc /path1 /path2" so I never observed this change. Thanks for your hint in the original reply!

That'll just have different bugs.

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You've noticed that too eh? It's such a shame to see a landmark application like mc having all these silly high user visibility bugs release after release. I really hope they get the hang of QA before its reputations is completely destroyed.

Did you consider a rollback to 4.8.4 from 14.0?

If I remember rightly 4.8.4 had a broken tree-view. The update >= 4.8.8 fixed that, but then something else broke; I can't remember what, but I remember that later someone posted requesting another bump because of it. And then, there was this bug.

No wonder Pat is pessimistic about the quality of future mc releases. It seems to be going through a protracted rough patch.

I don't generally like having the distro cover-over the cracks in upstream's work, but given the recent history of 'mc releases' we could be waiting a long time before we get a clean release version that actually works properly for everyone, so here's a patch to apply against slackware[64]-current/source/ap/mc/ that pulls in just this one 'arguments' fix from upstream. I guess it'll do until we can evaluate whether 4.8.11 is usable.

Interesting, didn't notice that. We could go further back to 4.7.5 from 13.37 or 4.6.1 from 11.0. This tool was "complete" already ten years ago and doesn't need further updates.