[Solved] Midnight commander not opening/navigating archives

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sirlark · Post by **sirlark** » Thu Dec 08, 2011 1:23 pm

I've recently updated midnight commander to 4.8.0-r1 on an old system about 6 months out of date. Since the update, and without having changed any config files, mc has stopped opening or navigating into archive files such as .zip, .tgz, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2 etc.

I've been through the settings to see what's going on, and I tried wiping my config files in case there was something wrong with them, but to no avail.

Anyone else had this problem, anyone know how to fix it?

Thanks in advance

Edit: long story short, update your config files, except they've moved. They are now in ~/.config/mc; ~/.mc and any ~/.mc* files are obsolete and can also be removed

ferreirafm · Post by **ferreirafm** » Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:29 pm

Hi sirlark,
That's a masked version. Downgrade to app-misc/mc-4.7.5.2 and you will have those features back.
G'Luck

brackenhill_mob · Post by **brackenhill_mob** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 12:37 pm

Now that it is not masked, can somebody suggest a solution?

I see from reading mc.ext that it is trying to open archives with u* programs, i.e. for zips it uses uzip. I cannot find uzip on my system nor can I find it using eix.

All ideas gratefully received!!

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 12:42 pm

Do you have app-arch/unzip installed?
Gerard.

brackenhill_mob · Post by **brackenhill_mob** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 2:42 pm

gerard82 wrote:Do you have app-arch/unzip installed?

Yes - v6.0-r1

sirlark · Post by **sirlark** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 7:02 pm

I don't think this is an mc.ext issue.

From my /etc/mc/mc.ext, the zip section

Code: Select all

# zip
type/^([Zz][Ii][Pp])\ archive
        Open=%cd %p/u[b]n[/b]zip://
        View=%view{ascii} unzip -v %f

# gzip
type/^gzip
        Open=gzip -dc %f | %var{PAGER:more}
        View=%view{ascii} gzip -dc %f 2>/dev/null

I added the 'n' myself, and it has made no difference. The open behaviour for all archive types fail, and yet clearly the gzip type command is fine. This is a VFS problem, and is possibly a bug that needs to be reported upstream. There is an ubuntu box at work which reports the following output from --version, and works

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GNU Midnight Commander 4.7.0
Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, cpiofs, ftpfs, fish
With builtin Editor
Using system-installed S-Lang library with terminfo database
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
With internationalization support
With multiple codepages support
Data types: char 8 int 32 long 64 void * 64 off_t 64 ecs_char 8

My gentoo box, which doesn't work, reports this

Code: Select all

GNU Midnight Commander 4.8.1
Built with GLib 2.30.2
Using the S-Lang library with terminfo database
With builtin Editor
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
With internationalization support
With multiple codepages support
Virtual File Systems: cpiofs, tarfs, sfs, extfs, ext2undelfs, ftpfs, fish, smbfs
Data types: char: 8; int: 32; long: 64; void *: 64; size_t: 64; off_t: 64;

fish, ext2undel, ftpfs, smbfs work, but none of the archive VFS's work, despite --version saying they are supported...

sirlark · Post by **sirlark** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 7:31 pm

So I did a little digging and experimenting... Firstly the following bugs seem relevant

https://www.midnight-commander.org/ticket/2650
https://www.midnight-commander.org/ticket/2613

Secondly, I tried the typing the following from within mc

Code: Select all

cd DIR-615_FW_4.12b01.zip/uzip://

which worked!!!

uzip:// is right, and it is VFS a protocol specification. But using

Code: Select all

cd %p/uzip://

while having the same file highlighted didn't work, although echo %p printed DIR-615_FW_4.12b01.zip

So it's something with the %p maybe?

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 7:42 pm

I have used mc for ages and never had any probs.
So far all compressed files opened by simply hitting enter with the cursor over it.
Have you read the ebuild text?
It says

Code: Select all

DEPEND="${RDEPEND}
	app-arch/xz-utils

Do you have xz-utils installed? (Just grabbing at a straw)
Gerard.

sirlark · Post by **sirlark** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 7:53 pm

Yes I have xz-utils installed, it's a dependency of mc and only applies to lzma acrhives. mc stopped working when they changed they VFS protocol format from <filename>#protocol to <filename>/protocol://

Also, as mentioned in an above post, the actual unarchiving machanism is working if you manually cd into the VFS protocol using an explicit filename... using %p as indicated in mc.ext or personal bindings files fails silently on pressing enter, but complains when typed on the commmand line that %p/uzip:// is not a directory

sirlark · Post by **sirlark** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 7:55 pm

Got it!

So over the course of the last couple of of version mc has moved it's config file location multiple times. I was trying to tweak thing in ~/.mc without any discernible results, but then I tried to edit my extension binding from within mc only to find I was dealing with a completely different file, in ~/.config/mc

I wiped both ~/.mc (since it's clearly obsolete) and ~/.config/mc to force mc to get the new personal settings from the system defaults, which were updated through the usual portage config file system. And voila! it works now...

brackenhill_mob · Post by **brackenhill_mob** » Wed Feb 15, 2012 11:04 am

sirlark wrote:I wiped both ~/.mc (since it's clearly obsolete) and ~/.config/mc to force mc to get the new personal settings from the system defaults, which were updated through the usual portage config file system. And voila! it works now...

Brilliant - thanks. I'd copied my heavily modified ~/.mc/bindings file to ~/.config/mc/mc.ext without doing a diff. I guess we're not in Kansas anymore