Midnight Commander (mc): convenient hard links creation from user menu
3rd December 2015
Midnight Commander is a convenient two-panel file manager with tons of features.
You can create hard links and symbolic links using C-x l and C-x s keyboard shortcuts. However, these two shortcuts invoke two completely different dialogs.
While for C-x s you get 2 pre-populated fields (path to the existing file, and path to the link – which is pre-populated with your opposite file panel path plus the name of the file under cursor; simply try it to see what I mean), for C-x l you only get 1 empty field: path of the hard link to create for a file under cursor. Symlink’s behaviour would be much more convenient…
Fortunately, a good man called Wiseman1024 created a feature request in the MC’s bug tracker 6 years ago. Not only had he done so, but he had also uploaded a sample mc user menu script (local copy), which works wonderfully! You can select multiple files, then F2 l (lower-case L), and hard-links to your selected files (or a file under cursor) will be created in the opposite file panel. Great, thank you Wiseman1024!
Word of warning: you must know what hard links are and what their limitations are before using this menu script. You also must check and understand the user menu code before adding it to your mc (by F9 C m u, and then pasting the script from the file).
Word of hope: 4 years ago Wiseman’s feature request was assigned to Future Releases version, so a more convenient C-x l will (sooner or later) become the part of mc. Hopefully.
