Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Using Completion in the bash Shell

One of the cool features of the bash shell is command argument completion, with which you can type just part of a command, press , and have bash complete the command for you (Code Listing 3.8).

Code Listing 3.8. In this example, we typed only the ls command followed by “cd pub” and pressed the key; bash completed the command for us.

bash-2.00$ ls Complete NewProject bogus2 → ftp puppy Completed News dead.letter → mail temp Mail access files → public_html testme bash-2.00$ cd public_html/ bash-2.00$

To use completion in the bash shell:

1.	ls -l Use ls -l to list the files in your current directory.
2.	cd ...