A while ago I wrote a custom bash tab completion plugin which would do CD path completion out of a couple of directories that I usually store interesting things, if there was no local completion. It worked fairly well, but the other night I realized that I'd probably be happier with something that did completion using the CDPATH.

Today I did some searching around and came across the bash-completion package on the Working more productively with bash 2.x page. Included there is an RPM which I installed. It was then as easy as sourcing "/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh" to get the completions set up. The next thing I knew I was able to complete via my CDPATH.

I also looked at zsh a bit, because it's well known for having good completion. I wasn't able to make any progress with it, though. I did test out the vi command-line editing mode, and found it was better than the editing available in bash 2.x. In particular, I had problems with "cwstring" followed by "." to repeat the command. In bash 2.x, it would repeat the "c", but forget about the rest. It looks like zsh and bash 3.x both do this properly.

comments powered by Disqus