Bash – Is It Possible for Bash Completion to Cycle Through Alternatives?

autocompletebash

When using bash completion and an a number of characters have been entered, tabbing ceases to work when the prefix you have typed is matched by more than one of the possibilities.

Is there a way to cycle through the alternatives of the prefix you have entered?

Best Answer

Bind the Tab key to the menu-complete command instead of the default complete. Put the following line in your ~/.bashrc:

bind '"\C-i": menu-complete'

or the following line in your ~/.inputrc (this will apply to all programs that use the readline library, not just bash):

"\C-i": menu-complete

Related Solutions

Bash auto completion script

The compgen builtin has a -X argument for this very purpose:

-X filterpat
    filterpat is a pattern as used for filename expansion. It is applied to the list of 
    possible completions generated by the preceding options and arguments, and each 
    completion matching filterpat is removed from the list. A leading ! in filterpat 
    negates the pattern; in this case, any completion not matching filterpat is removed.

So you could probably just do something like:

_avail_kernel_builds() {
    case $COMP_CWORD in
        1) COMPREPLY=( $(cd /secure/kernel_builds; compgen -d -X "source") ) ;;
    esac
 }

So compgen -d says "list the folders in the current directory", and -X "source" says "...but filter out anything named "source".

Bash – How to Cycle Through Reverse-i-Search

If I understand the question correctly you should be able to cycle through alternatives by repeatedly hitting Ctrl + R.

E.g.:

Ctrl + R
grep
Ctrl + R
Ctrl + R ...

That searches backwards through your history. To search forward instead, use Ctrl + S, but you may need to have set: stty -ixon (either by .bash_profile or manually) prior to that to disable the XON/XOFF feature which takes over Ctrl + S. (More details here.)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash auto completion script

Bash – How to Cycle Through Reverse-i-Search

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