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UAdapter
Asked: 2012-01-04 02:54:42 +0800 CST

How can I grep through tab completion possibilities?

  • 772

When I press tab in a console I get this output

Display all 2957 possibilities? (y or n)

Is there any way to use grep on these 2957 possibilities? I would like to search for all commands with the word "svn" in them.

bash

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The solution is the bash builtin compgen. To grep 'svn' from all available commands and command aliases accessible through $PATH, type.

    compgen -ac | grep svn

    Want to search from a certain prefix (eg all commands that start with ecrypt)? Use regular expressions..

    compgen -ac | grep "^ecrypt"
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  2. You can try using compgen.

    For example:

    compgen -ac | grep "svn"
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  3. This should be equivallent:

    for x in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g'`; do ls $x | grep svn; done
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  4. for i in $(echo $PATH | tr ":" "\n"); do find $i -type f -perm +111; done | grep svn

    Very similar to totaam's answer apart from this limits its scope to executables (as Bash does). But JJE's compgen is another mile better.

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  5. maybe {,.}*svn* helps here, e.g. ls -l /usr/bin/{,.}*svn*<tab>.

    But, have a look on the Zsh! Here: http://www.jukie.net/bart/blog/zsh-tab-completion are some great examples how it can help to reduce your tab completion results. This includes also negation, e.g. if you want all tab-completion results without the word "foobar", or all results with even digits in the first place, subdirectory tab-completion and much more. The reason why I changed to zsh was history sharing between all open terminals.

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  6. I didn't knew compgen, and would have suggested:

    ls -d ${PATH//:/\/*svn* } 2>/dev/null

    for bash. 

    ${VAR//pattern/replace} replaces in VAR pattern with replace. // is used to replace every pattern, not just the first, which would be just /.
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