Bash programming/Bash command-line completion

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Support for bash completion feature is provided in Debian and Ubuntu distribution by the bash completion package. Once installed you also usually need to uncomment the following in /etc/bash.bashrc and/or .bashrc files to source the bash completion files. The following example is from /etc/bash.bashrc[1]: 

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then
    . /etc/bash_completion
fi

MacOS also support autocompletion in bash[2], create or add the following lines to file: ~/.inputrc 

set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
TAB: menu-complete

If you need autocompletion for your ssh hostname, you should modify your ~./.bash_profile file [3], using the builtins complete and compgen commands or install bash-completion package.


  1. ↑ https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12356/how-does-tab-auto-complete-find-options-to-complete
  2. ↑ https://timleland.com/how-to-enable-autocomplete-in-mac-terminal/
  3. ↑ https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/136351/autocomplete-server-names-for-ssh-and-scp
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