On July 19, 2015, Jude DaShiell wrote: > When using tab completion in bash, sometimes more than a single > possibility arises if there are say two or more paths starting out > with the same prefix. To select from one of those choces, do I > need to key in the whole choice from the beginning of the path or > can I key in enough letters to uniquely identify my choice after > that list displays? You only need to type enough to disambiguate it and then hitting <tab> will complete until the next ambiguity. So if you have a directory containing the following three files with date-stamps for the names: 2015-04-01.txt 2015-04-09.txt 2015-05-15.txt you can type "2" followed by <tab> and it will complete up to the month. You can then type "5" and hit <tab> and it will complete the last file. Or instead of "5", you can type "4" and hit <tab>, and it will complete the "-0" then wait for you to disambiguate with either "1" or "9", after which you can then hit <tab> again to complete the rest of the file-name. Alternatively, you can add the following line to your .bashrc (or just execute it in a shell to test it out) bind "TAB:auto-complete" which will give the DOS/Windows flavor of completion where hitting <tab> will complete with the next possible completion-name. So with the above files, you'd type "2" followed by <tab> and it would use "2015-04-01.txt" then you could hit <tab> again and it would change it to "2015-04-09.txt" and <tab> again for the "2015-05-15.txt" file. > I tried search inside man bash for list completion and did not find > this material though a long time ago I was looking for something > else and stumbled on this material in that man page. The information is scattered around a bit. In the bash man-page, it's in the "READLINE" section under the "Readline Key Bindings" sub-section. But it doesn't detail everything, so you have catch that the "bind" command is a bash built-in, so you then execute bind -l to list all the available bindings. I don't have a good resource for detailing all of the available bindings, but the above should at least get you started. -tim _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list