[gcb]

and that validates midnight commander as a tool with the unix philosophy how?

downvote all you want. but a clone of norton commander was and always will be a joke.

...saw several sysadmins using it to delete files named with dash because they didn't know "--" is posix for stop taking flags. and that's just one bad vice it foments.

[angrycoder]

> but a clone of norton commander was and always will be a joke

why?

P.S. - if you can answer without the elitist bullshit, people will probably stop down voting you.

[pivo]

For me MC has always struck me as something someone uses as a crutch when they're not interested in learning the "unix way" of doing things, which usually means using the command line.

The idea of MC never appealed to me so I admit I've never used it. When I see other people using it it seems awkward and slow, and the people using it never seem to know much about unix. Of course it could be that they just don't know the application well and it is in fact really fantastic. So my perception could be completely wrong.

[gcb]

despite it being a GUI tool that can't be piped, that loose all the shell goodness such as command history and text substitution, I already did in my example.

the sysadmins in question used mc to delete weird named files just because they never bothered to learn correct argument passing in bash. they didn't know about quotes for filenames with spaces, they didn't know about '--' flag parsing termination argument. when their badly written script broke, they just manually fixed with mc and call it a day.

it's like seeing someone not using the scroll wheel to scroll. If you think that's elitist so be it. http://www.reddit.com/tb/df8cd