Re: mc 4.7.0-pre1 marking directories with -/+/*

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Paul Hartman wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have used mc for years and can't live without it. :)
>
> I recently updated to mc 4.7.0-pre1 so I can see what's new and the
> first thing I noticed was now directories are marked as part of -/+/*
> operations by default. For - and + there is a "Files Only" checkbox,
> but I can find no such thing for *. I have three questions:
>
> 1) Can I make "Files Only" checkbox remember its setting?
> 2) Is there a setting to toggle whether * marks dirs?
> 3) Or maybe a global "Files Only" to make -/+/* behave like previous MC?
>
> I also realize it's a -pre1 so maybe the options related to this new
> functionality simply don't exist (yet) or are not in the UI.
>
> I often use the Compare Directories function to compare files in two
> directories, which marks the differences. In my case I actually want
> to find the duplicates, so I would press * in one panel to invert the
> selection and press F8 to delete the duplicate files... now it selects
> the duplicates along with every subdirectory (since they were not
> marked as part of the compare operation). It's not a big deal but if
> there are many subdirectories it can take a while to un-mark them
> (since there is no "Directories only" option in -/+ that I can find).
>
> If you need more info, or if I should create a ticket instead, please
> let me know.
>
> Thanks for the great work!

I have not yet tried any pre- version, but I have been running a recent 
SVN tree version for a while, now. The switch from marking files with 
Cntrl-Alt-Plus to marking files _and_ directories is something which seems 
to have come in recently. I have also found this change to be annoying, 
irritating, inconvenient, and, under some circumstances, positively 
dangerous (think of someone who wants to delete files and not recursively 
to delete subdirectories, for example, or who wants to move all files but 
not recursively to move all subdirectories from an FTP site and 
discovers that one has initiated a very different course of action and 
it is too late to stop it!).

I think it is natural that one might naturally want to mark files for some 
purpose, and not sudirectories. Why change a thing like that?

Theodore Kilgore