Bash has, since somewhere in the middle of the 2.04 betas, supported various additions to its tab-completion feature. Mac OS X includes version 2.05b of Bash but does not include a default tab-completion setup file. There’s no official file so that’s understandable, but there is a very complete and common file used for these that can be added. It’s a very easy addition and allows for a wide range of tab-completion additions including pulling host names out of your .ssh_known_hosts file to expand when using ssh and a wide variety of others (alias, export, shell, complete, chown, chgrp, mount, umount, man, renice, kill, killall, pgrep, find, ifconfig, postfix, cvs, apt-*, chsh, ssh/scp, rsync, route, and on, and on, and on). It does cause Bash to take about 1-1.5 seconds to start up once installed, but you can easily go into the file and remove the ones you’ll never use.
- Go to Working More Productively With Bash and grab the file
bash-completion-20041017.tar.gz (or whatever the latest is) at the end of the linked section. Read the stuff there for more information about this.
- Expand the archive and move the
bash_completion file to /etc.
- Edit
/etc/bashrc and append the following: . /etc/bash_completion
Now open a new shell and try out a couple, such as the immediately-useful ssh completion: $ ssh co[tab]
$ ssh codepoetry.net
Or use darwinports: port install bash-completion
The file has since been updated, so it’s no longer called that (the date changed). You may want to make the directions more specific…
Danke.