Midnight Commander and zsh - "Warning: cannot change directory..."

Midnight Commander and zsh - "Warning: cannot change directory..."

[Zbigniew B.]

Hallo,

I noticed strange problems when running mc from within zsh: when
trying to change directory (using <Enter>, or <F3>) very often - no
idea, what it's depending on - there's a message: "Warning: cannot
change directory..." (or something like that), although in fact it
changed to new directory. Even worse: sometimes after printing out the
warning both mc's panels are moved higher, making the screen unusable
(the topmost line, of course, goes away).

I noticed, it's somehow related to subshell, because no such problems
at all, when mc has been run with "mc -u".

Surely someone noticed the problem earlier, and perhaps even found the
cure? zsh 4.3.9, mc 4.6.2-pre1, Linux, Glibc 2.8

Zbigniew

Re: Midnight Commander and zsh - "Warning: cannot change directory..."

[Peter Stephenson]

"Zbigniew B." wrote:
> I noticed strange problems when running mc from within zsh: when
> trying to change directory (using <Enter>, or <F3>) very often - no
> idea, what it's depending on - there's a message: "Warning: cannot
> change directory..." (or something like that), although in fact it
> changed to new directory. Even worse: sometimes after printing out the
> warning both mc's panels are moved higher, making the screen unusable
> (the topmost line, of course, goes away).
> 
> I noticed, it's somehow related to subshell, because no such problems
> at all, when mc has been run with "mc -u".
> 
> Surely someone noticed the problem earlier, and perhaps even found the
> cure? zsh 4.3.9, mc 4.6.2-pre1, Linux, Glibc 2.8

No, but if you can track down the exact error message we might be able
to suggest possibilities.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070

Odp: Midnight Commander and zsh - "Warning: cannot change directory..."

[Zbigniew B.]

For example, if I'm going to enter "News" sub-dir, it just says:
"Warning: cannot change to /home/zb/News".

There are two things worthy to mention:

1. That mentioned earlier side-effect of moving the panels up is more
likely to see, when the sub-directory name (the one I'm going to
enter) contains some non-alphanumerical character (f.e.
"#sharedobject"). But it's not limited to only such case.

2. In fact, I couldn't see that effect, when I changed my locale to
"en_US" - in such case there was just the "warning..." (but I didn't
try that long, so I'm not sure, is the english locale "effect-free").
Perhaps mc has issues with i18n? Or it's zsh subshell-related rather?

If you change your LANG and LC_ALL to f.e. "pl_PL" - you can see that
annoying effect faster.

Zbigniew

2009/2/3, Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>:
> "Zbigniew B." wrote:
>> I noticed strange problems when running mc from within zsh: when
>> trying to change directory (using <Enter>, or <F3>) very often - no
>> idea, what it's depending on - there's a message: "Warning: cannot
>> change directory..." (or something like that), although in fact it
>> changed to new directory. Even worse: sometimes after printing out the
>> warning both mc's panels are moved higher, making the screen unusable
>> (the topmost line, of course, goes away).
>>
>> I noticed, it's somehow related to subshell, because no such problems
>> at all, when mc has been run with "mc -u".
>>
>> Surely someone noticed the problem earlier, and perhaps even found the
>> cure? zsh 4.3.9, mc 4.6.2-pre1, Linux, Glibc 2.8
>
> No, but if you can track down the exact error message we might be able
> to suggest possibilities.
>
> --
> Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
> CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
> Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070
>

Re: Odp: Midnight Commander and zsh - "Warning: cannot change directory..."

[Peter Stephenson]

"Zbigniew B." wrote:
> For example, if I'm going to enter "News" sub-dir, it just says:
> "Warning: cannot change to /home/zb/News".

I think that particular message (which I'm not seeing) is coming from mc
rather than zsh.  There may be something the shell is doing to provoke
it, but it's hard to tell what.  Are you using a CDPATH?  Does changing
that make a difference?

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070

Re: Odp: Midnight Commander and zsh - "Warning: cannot change directory..."

[Zbigniew B.]

> I think that particular message (which I'm not seeing)

It's not about message itself (that surely comes from mc) but about
the reason, _why_ it is so, when the shell is zsh, and mc has subshell
enabled. Didn't notice nothing like this in case of bash, so the
answer is rather simple: there's something wrong in cooperation zsh
<-> mc, and I'm trying to find out, what exactly. But the most
annoying thing is spoiling the mc's panels.

About CDPATH: no, there's no such variable in my environment. But
setting it doesn't change anything in the descibed matter.

Pay attention, that some distro-specific installations of mc
apparently could have its subshell set "fixed" to bash. I'm not 100%
sure, but it seems to me, that f.e. in case of Debian it's true.

And so even if I'm starting in zsh - I've got bash from within mc (its
subshell). That  can be an explaining, why there's no warning.

Zbigniew

Re: Midnight Commander and zsh - "Warning: cannot change directory..."

[Tomasz Pala]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 11:23:33 -0200, Zbigniew B. wrote:

> It's not about message itself (that surely comes from mc) but about
> the reason, _why_ it is so, when the shell is zsh, and mc has subshell
> enabled. Didn't notice nothing like this in case of bash, so the
> answer is rather simple: there's something wrong in cooperation zsh
> <-> mc, and I'm trying to find out, what exactly. But the most
> annoying thing is spoiling the mc's panels.

It happens with bash too. Regarding login and interactive shell (bash or zsh)
when SHELL=/bin/bash is set underscore char in dir name causes:

Warning: Cannot change to /home/users/[....]/public_html

unset SHELL or export SHELL=sth_other_than_bash fixes it.
So check for SHELL value and blame mc-bash interaction.

-- 
Tomasz Pala <gotar@pld-linux.org>