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Asked: 2015-09-21 22:03:46 +0800 CST

TAB press for auto-complete does not work for some service names [duplicate]

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I can run following command on my Ubuntu 14.04.3 Terminal without any problem:

sudo service network-manager restart
[sudo] password for username: 
network-manager stop/waiting
network-manager start/running, process 5204

If I type sudo service network and then press Tab it is auto completed to sudo service networking.
If I type sudo service network-ma and them press Tab no auto-complete occurs.

My question is if there is a service named network-manager that could be restarted by service command why its name is not auto-completed? and How to solve it?

Update:

ls -l /etc/init.d/network*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4479 Apr 28  2014 /etc/init.d/networking
command-line

1 Answers

  1. The tab completion for service looks foe files in /etc/init.d. Since there is no network-manager file there, the tab completion fails. A better question is why service network-manager works at all.

    According to the service man page:

       The  SCRIPT  parameter  specifies  a  System  V init script, located in
   /etc/init.d/SCRIPT, or the name of an upstart  job  in  /etc/init.

    So, since there is a /etc/init/network-manager.conf file, service can query it, but there is no autocompletion because there is no script of that name in /etc/init.d.

    A simple workaround would be to create an empty file called network-manager in /etc/init.d:

    sudo touch /etc/init.d/network-manager

    Once you've done that, you can tab-complete the name as expected. I tested this in a VM and it seemed to work fine, the service network-manager start|stop|restart|status commands all worked and nothing seemed to be broken. I assume that means that the empty file is ignored and only used for the completion, so it looks like this is safe.

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