Bash – How to Enable Autocomplete in SSH Session

autocompletebashssh

It seems that bash doesn't want to autocomplete commands (what's annoying me right now is not autocompleting apt-get) when I'm logged into my machine from SSH. Is there some setting that will allow bash to autocomplete inside an ssh session?

Best Answer

In short: source /etc/bash_completion should do the trick (run it in the shell within the SSH session).

Long story: in order for bash completion to work, you have to tell bash how to complete each command's arguments. This requires a long sequence of invocations of the bash built-in command complete; therefore, they are usually collected in a separate script (or several ones in /etc/bash.complete.d/*) that loads them all.

Being a regular shell script, you can always load the bash_completion in any shell startup script (~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, ~/.bashrc)

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Shell – TAB autocomplete in Bourne Shell

(No answer to your exact question, but many workarounds.)

You don't need to match your scripting shell with your interactive shell. (For example, most (t)csh or zsh users write sh scripts). If you have or can install a better interactive shell than the Bourne shell (zsh, bash, tcsh), go for it. Even if you can't, look if there's a ksh, which is likely to have slightly better interactive features than a Bourne shell.

You can check what character the tab key sends by entering echo ' Ctrl+V Tab ' | od -t x1 Enter. 0000000 09 0a (i.e. at position 0, two characters, a tab and a newline) is the expected output. I don't expect this to be the issue.

If you can't get a comfortable environment, you could try doing more things remotely, using your local machine for interaction as much as possible. This has its ups and downs.

From Linux (or most other unices including OSX, but not from Windows), you can use sshfs to access the remote filesystem.
Within Emacs, you can easily browse remote files via Tramp (open /os390hostname:/path/on/remote/machine, you get completion). You can also use Eshell to get a remote shell interface (an Emacs built-in shell); if you change to a remote directory (cd /os390hostname:/path/on/remote/machine), the external commands you launch will be executed on the remote machine. If you need to run commands as root, Tramp (and Eshell which is based on it) can combine ssh with su or sudo.

Zsh autocomplete directory

Not exactly what you asked but I use s to run scripts. So for example if I have a file ~/Scripts/run-stuff.sh I can type s run-stuff.sh and it will run the script. It will also do tab-completion of the script name. The only thing it doesn't do is handle sub-directories in the scripts directory.

# Completion for s (scripts)
_s_comp() {
    if [ $OS = "mac" ]; then
        local LS=gls;
    else
        local LS=ls;
    fi
    reply=(`$LS --ignore-backups $HOME/Scripts/`);
}

compctl -K _s_comp s

It's possible that you may also need an alias like alias s="$HOME/Scripts

Edit: note that this will work regardless of what directory you are currently in.

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Shell – TAB autocomplete in Bourne Shell

Zsh autocomplete directory

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