Re: skitzoid start/quit location

[Paul Hartman <paul hartman+gentoo gmail com>]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 9:31 AM, Felix Miata <mrmazda earthlink net> wrote:
> I'm a heavy MC user with multiple installations of Fedora, Mageia, Mandriva,
> *Buntu, & openSUSE, including devel versions. Since v4.7.5 or v4.8.0 or so,
> there seems to be no rhyme or reason to where MC is located when
> initialized, or the dir current on exit. On some it always starts in a
> particular location, while in others it starts in the dir current when
> started, and same for quitting. I've turned off auto save setups wherever
> I've been able to find them.
>
> What controls this location of start and quit behavior? Looking in mc.ini
> nothing jumps out at me, same as in menu options. What I want is the old
> behavior from 4.6.1 or so, starting in the dir current when started, and
> staying in the dir current on exit. How can I get what I want in recent
> versions like 4.8.1 & 4.8.3?

For the starting directory, I believe if you have auto-save setup
enabled, it will save the location of the inactive panel when you
startup, and use current location for the active panel. (Note there
was another thread here recently about a bug with the active panel
logic). If you have multiple instances of MC it will be the location
from the instance that you exited from most recently (trampling the
previous instances).

For the exiting directory, MC writes pwd to a temp file inside $TMPDIR
and usually you would use a wrapper script which reads that and will
chdir to it upon exit, should you desire that to happen.

On my Gentoo system, this is the wrapper script:

MC_USER=`id | sed 's/[^(]*(//;s/).*//'`
MC_PWD_FILE="${TMPDIR-/tmp}/mc-$MC_USER/mc.pwd.$$"
/usr/bin/mc -P "$MC_PWD_FILE" "$@"

if test -r "$MC_PWD_FILE"; then
        MC_PWD="`cat "$MC_PWD_FILE"`"
        if test -n "$MC_PWD" && test -d "$MC_PWD"; then
                cd "$MC_PWD"
        fi
        unset MC_PWD
fi

rm -f "$MC_PWD_FILE"
unset MC_PWD_FILE


Don't know if that specific implementation is distro-specific or part
of the generic MC source releases... I'm using 4.8.3 on Gentoo and it
behaves just like it always has, for me.