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Reverse Tab Completion

2 points by lucasgonze ↗ HN
Is it possible to get reverse tab completion, so that you type the last characters in the filename you want, press tab (or whatever the reverse keystroke is), and get the full file name?

Sometimes I have files where the unique bit is at the end, and tab completion is useless for them. For example with these ---

version1.txt version2.txt version3.txt

--- I'd have to type out "version" before hitting tab, and what I'd like is to type 1.txt, hit tab, and have "version" prepended.

1 comment

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ktpsns
Shells like bash do wildcard expansion on tab keystroke. So you type

   cat version*.txt
then tab and it expands that into

   cat version1.txt version2.txt version3.txt
The same is of course true with any other kind of wildcard like

   *.tar.gz
(is that what you mean with reverse tab completion?) And even ranges like "version{1..3}" and much more. Look up http://bash-hackers.org, the ultimate guide for shell globbing and other bash features.