Hi there,

 

I use midnight commander to move data round on the server. I thought it should be possible to get a shortcut in windows that would

1) ssh or telnet into the server

2) cd to a certain directory

3) launch mc

 

I did some testing and I got it working to a certain point, but now I am stuck.

 

So here is what I have:

First, launch cygwin and start a script from cygwin home folder (this one-liner would be the windows shurtcut):

 C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe -ha -e script.sh

 

Second, the cygwin script:

(/usr/bin/echo open TOWER;
/usr/bin/sleep 1;
/usr/bin/echo USERNAME;
/usr/bin/sleep 2;
/usr/bin/echo PASSWORD;
/usr/bin/sleep 1;
/usr/bin/echo mc;
/usr/bin/cat) | /usr/bin/telnet

 

This WILL log into the server and start midnight commander, but the arrow keys won't work - so it's useless.

However, if I manually do a telnet login (from the very same cygwin window) and then launch mc it works just fine.

I know that this "poor man's" inline Telnet is just a dirty workaround. In fact the "/usr/bin/cat" command close to the end keeps the window interactive, otherwise it would just close and never show the midnight commander. I am not exactly sure if this is the root of the problem.

 

I also made an attempt with ssh but I got stuck there, too.

In this case the script.sh looks like this:

ssh USERNAME@TOWER "cd ../mnt/user; mc"

And it throws the error:

Cannot get terminal settings: Invalid argument (22)
TERM environment variable needs set.

I checked the TERM variable and its xterm, which is what mc likes.

 

If anyone can make it work eitherway round, that would be great.

 

Cheers!

I personally use this script. http://jerrymannel.com/blog/2008/11/11/telnet-scripting-tool-aka-tst10exe/ Seems pretty effective for moving files from one directory to another on my unRAID machine called from my Windows7 machine using a short cut or a batch script. I call it as follows.

 

C:\BatchCommands\tst10.exe /r:C:\BatchCommands\movefiles.txt

 

This is the contents of movefiles.txt

 

tower

WAIT "login:"

SEND "root\m"

WAIT "Password:"

SEND "MYPASSWORDHERE\m"

WAIT ":~#"

SEND "mv /mnt/disk3/Movies/uploads/* /mnt/disk3/Movies/All/\m"

SEND "rmdir /mnt/disk3/Movies/uploads/\m"

SEND "exit\m"

 

It simply copies all contents of one directory uploads from one location to another. Then it deletes the upload folder. I have another script I use to creates the folder when I have something to put in it. I delete it for a reason because if the folder exists then I know I have things in there I need to address before I move them.

 

Currently it does not support SSH so you have to use Telnet.

Thanks for you feedback kizer. One solution at last, although I have some doubts: First of all the tool comes from a blog that states the original source went offline. Maybe I am paranoid, but I have troubles to trust it. Apart from that I am wondering if it has telnet build in or if it uses an external telnet application? One reason why I go for cygwin-minnty is that it I have control over font and the window goes full screen - contrary to the horrible horrible windows-cmd. MC in a cmd window ... nah.

 

If anyone still has idea why its not working the way I tried, I would be happy.

 

However, I will look now into screen now. In fact, when copying larger amounts of data (e.g. to/from USB drives) it might be better to have mc running in screen anyway, just in case ....

I made a quick test and mc seems to remain functional when a screen session gets disconnected and reconnected.

I found a small guide on how to auto-resume screen sessions here:

http://taint.org/wk/RemoteLoginAutoScreen

I am not perfectly happy with it yet, but I will do some further testing next week and report back findings.

If I can make this work nicely it would be perfectly fine. I will just leave mc running all the time, so all I need to do is create a shortcut that launches ssh and attempts a login -> one-click mc session open

 

Cheers!

For testing I created a bashrc and screenrc file. For obvious reason they don't survive a reboot, so I crawled the forum a bit. The solution is to keep the files elsewhere (/boot) and copy them upon reboot to the according place (~) via the go script. I tested every single command in the terminal to verify it's doing what I want it to do. However, when I reboot nothing of it is done .

 

echo "if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc fi" >> ~/.bash_profile
cp /boot/.bashrc ~/.bashrc
cp /boot/.screenrc ~/.screenrc

 

Cheers!