Comments on: Tab completion

By: Car Loan

Car Loan — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:33:57 +0000

Tab completion very much will be incredible business and you expressed astonishingly; thanks for the info!

By: Eric3

Eric3 — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 20:42:49 +0000

By adding the line
bind ‘”\t”:menu-complete’
to your .profile, any time you hit tab on an ambiguous entry, it will start to cycle through the matches in the directory. Just keep hitting tab until you see the filename you want, then continue typing.

By: FreeMacUnix » Blog Archive » Command history

FreeMacUnix » Blog Archive » Command history — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:52:25 +0000

[...] Besides tab completion, another way to cut down on the amount of typing you do in Unix is the history command. Open Terminal, type history and press Enter. You’ll see a list of Unix commands you previously typed. If you’d like to rerun a command you previously used, you could of course Copy and Paste, or you can type an exclamation point (!) and the number of the command. For instance, if you see that the 10th command in your history is ls -al and you want to run it again, you can type !10 and that command will be re-executed. [...]

By: FreeMacUnix » Blog Archive » Tab completion, part 2

FreeMacUnix » Blog Archive » Tab completion, part 2 — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 07:10:50 +0000

[...] In the last post we discussed how tab completion makes typing Unix commands much easier. The downside, as Janssen pointed out, is that tab completion is case-sensitive, so typing cd doc and hitting tab won’t complete cd Documents/. But there’s a way to change this. [...]

By: richard

richard — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 06:50:47 +0000

Glenn & JP: Thanks for the correction about the tab completion being a part of bash, not all Unix shells. Also, the use of wildcards is important. I hope to fully cover that as well.

Janssen: In the next post I’ll explain how to make tab completion case insensitive, which should make it even easier to use!

Thanks for the comments.

By: JP

JP — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 06:02:06 +0000

Great tip!! I didn’t know TAB TAB would display available commands. I’ll be sure to use that if I’m running bash or csh.

For what it is worth TAB is not how it is done in all *nix shells.

ksh comes to mind that doesn’t use tab, unfortunately I don’t know what key it uses to do file/command completion. Rather, I typically use wildcards to get to where I want to go.

For example,
cd ~/Doc*/Sch*/Fa*06/C*440

By: Janssen

Janssen — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:35:51 +0000

This will definitely help me learn the syntax. Does it work with extra flags? Although, maybe that wouldn’t be very helpful since most flags are a single letter.

After playing with this, I noticed a couple of things:

This feature is case sensitive, which is annoying for the cd command… others may prefer that. My second observation helps solve that problem…

A third tab (after a unique command has been selected) prints the contents of the working directory (including invisible files, just like an ‘ls -A’ command) and brings you back to where you were in entering the command. This will be very useful for those times when I forget the exact name of the file or folder I want to target with the command.

By: Glenn Kerbein

Glenn Kerbein — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 15:43:02 +0000

When presented with multiple chioces from tab-completion, you can hit the 'esc' key. And tab-completion is not restricted to UNIX, nor does it belong to UNIX, that feature is part of bash, the Bourne-again Shell. You can use tab-completion for full document names, folders, or commands themselfs (for long commands like apcachectl). You can use an asterisk whereever it is appropriate, like when you have a folder of .txt files and want to cat them together, you can issue something like cat cat-me-*.txt > big-file.txt.