Ubuntu – How to make tab completion append slash for directory symlinks

auto-completionbashcommand line

My ~/Documents directory is a symlink:

nathan@nathan-desktop:~$ stat Documents
  File: Documents -> /mnt/nathan/extended/Documents

If I want to cd into the directory, I can type:

c d space D o
c tab

…and tab completion will append uments to the end of cd Doc as expected. However, it does not append a trailing /, even though the symlink points to a directory.

Is there a way to make Bash do that?

Best Answer

Enable the mark-symlinked-directories option for READLINE. There are few ways to do that:

  1. Customize your readline by putting commands in an .inputrc file:

    • Create or edit ~/.inputrc and add these lines:

      $include /etc/inputrc
set mark-symlinked-directories on

    • Log-in/Log-out or press ctrl+x and ctrl+r to reload the settings.

  2. Customize your readline by putting commands in the .bashrc file (or in the .profile file):

    • Edit ~/.bashrc and add this line:

      bind 'set mark-symlinked-directories on'

    • Log-in/Log-out or source the file:

      source ~/.bashrc

  3. Customize the readline for all users by creating a .sh file into the directory /etc/profile.d:

    • Create a file /etc/profile.d/mark-symlinked-directories.sh which should looks like:

      #!/bin/sh
bind 'set mark-symlinked-directories on'

      Executable permissions to this file are not needed.

    • Log-in/Log-out. That's it.

Further reading:

One simple way that I found is double tab for completion:

c d space D o c tab tab

The first tab will append uments, the second one will append / and the third will print the list of contained directories.

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