Bash – Don’t suggest current directory in autocomplete

autocompletebashdirectoryzsh

I am a long time user of ZSH. It seems to me that I used to have this functionality a long time ago but then I rewrote my .zshrc (a long time ago) and now I miss this functionality every now and then. (Of course, being a long time ago, my memory may be faulty.)

What I want is that when I am autocompleting (such as pressing tab etc.) then I don't want suggestions from my current directory if I am starting from 1 level up (i.e., '..') or more.

So if I do

/usr/share$ cd ../<tab>

then I don't want my current directory as a suggestion

/usr/share$ cd ../share/

The question is for ZSH but I would love to know if it can be done in Bash too.

Best Answer

From http://zshwiki.org/home/examples/compsys/ignore#ignore_parent_directory

zstyle ':completion:*:(cd|mv|cp):*' ignore-parents parent pwd

See also info zsh ignore-parents for details. Reproduced below for zsh 5.4.2:

ignore-parents

 The style is tested without a tag by the function completing
 pathnames in order to determine whether to ignore the names of
 directories already mentioned in the current word, or the name of
 the current working directory.  The value must include one or both
 of the following strings:

 parent
      The name of any directory whose path is already contained in
      the word on the line is ignored.  For example, when completing
      after foo/../, the directory foo will not be considered a
      valid completion.

 pwd
      The name of the current working directory will not be
      completed; hence, for example, completion after ../ will not
      use the name of the current directory.

 In addition, the value may include one or both of:

 ..
      Ignore the specified directories only when the word on the
      line contains the substring '../'.

 directory
      Ignore the specified directories only when names of
      directories are completed, not when completing names of files.

 Excluded values act in a similar fashion to values of the
 ignored-patterns style, so they can be restored to consideration by
 the _ignored completer.

Related Solutions

Why is zsh (oh-the-zsh) completing directories that don’t exist

_kadmin is probably a completer function for the kadmin tool - not a directory. If you attempt completion on something that zsh can't find as a command, a directory or a valid and known command argument completion, it then starts to offer completion functions as possible expansion candidates. By default, zsh comes with a lot of completers, many of which you may not need - there are bundles for AIX, BSD, Cygwin, various Linux distributions, etc, and they all get read and installed into the shell. If you attempt an expansion on something zsh can't find, it has all those installed completion functions to offer you instead.

You configure zsh not to offer completer functions by putting this in your ~/.zshrc:

zstyle ':completion:*:functions' ignored-patterns '_*'

Reload the file and you should no longer be offered completion functions for tools you don't have installed. Have a look at the zshcompsys manpage for (a lot) more detail.

EDIT in reply to UPDATE 3

If _kadmin is actually a user account, you can configure zsh to not offer it in completions. It seems the approach is to list the user accounts you do want the shell to consider, which limits any names offered only to those listed. The zstyle line is something like this:

zstyle ':completion:*' users asgeo1 root

I think you can list as many users as you like after the users tag. The shell will then only offer those users' home directories as possible completions for the cd function or builtin.

I don't know why adding the username to the ignored-patterns in the completion.zsh file didn't work - did you reload your config after making the change?

Zsh – How to Stop Zsh from Completing Parent Directories

This kind of behavior is configured through styles (except for a few fundamentals that have options). You'll want to turn off path-completion.

By default, filename completion examines all components of a path to see if there are completions of that component. For example, /u/b/z can be completed to /usr/bin/zsh. Explicitly setting this style to false inhibits this behaviour for path components up to the / before the cursor

zstyle ':completion:*' path-completion false

You may want to turn on accept-exact-dirs instead. With path-completion left on and accept-exact-dirs turned on, zsh will only attempt completion for path components other than the last one if the path doesn't exist.

zstyle ':completion:*' accept-exact-dirs true

Best Answer

ignore-parents

Related Solutions

Why is zsh (oh-the-zsh) completing directories that don’t exist

Zsh – How to Stop Zsh from Completing Parent Directories

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