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The Terminal Emulator, in Mandriva


The Terminal Emulator



If you do View > Show Terminal Emulator or Ctrl-M, a new area will appear near the bottom of the screen, between the panes and the statusbar. This is the Terminal Emulator, a place where you can type commands such as ls or df -h and have the result displayed. It also is where are displayed the results of Find, Grep and Locate (see Tools).

Just like a real console, the Terminal Emulator has a prompt. By default this will look something like: david@linux: /home/david $> (especially if you're called 'david'). However this can be configured at Options > Configure 4Pane > Terminals. Changes will take effect the next time the Terminal Emulator is opened.

On the right you will see three buttons with self-explanatory labels. The Cancel button does its best to interrupt a running command, but it doesn't always succeed. This can be a problem, as the Terminal Emulator isn't as fast as a real console; a command that displays hundreds of thousands of lines will take a long time to finish.

The Terminal Emulator has other disadvantages too:

However: There is also an extra feature that I often find useful. If you use Locate or Find, in the results you'll have a list of files. You can: The size of the Terminal Emulator can be adjusted by dragging its top border up or down. It can be closed by the same methods that open it, or by clicking its Close button.

The Command-line

This is a single-line version of the Terminal Emulator. It is shown/hidden by View > Show Command-line or Ctrl-F6, and is positioned just below the toolbar.
You can use the Command-line in the same sort of way as the Terminal Emulator, but as it's only a single line, any output of a command is shown in the Terminal Emulator. So why not just use the Terminal Emulator in the first place? Good question. I've no idea why file-managers usually have both; but they do, so presumably someone likes them. If you want it, it's there.


If you run a command in the Terminal Emulator or Command-line, it's executed outside 4Pane; therefore the results can't be Undone and Redone. So don't experiment here with 'rm -f /' ;)