Bash $PATH filtering
How to filter things out of bash completion
As most modern GNU+Linux distro users already know, you get a lot of tools
included for free! Many of these may clutter up your $PATH and make bash tab
completion more difficult than it has to be. Here’s a way to improve this!
A mess:
Here’s what I see when I tab-complete cd<TAB>:
james@computer:~$ cd
cd cddb_query cd-info cd-read
cd-convert cd-drive cd-it8 cdrecord
cd-create-profile cd-fix-profile cdmkdir cdtmpmkdir
cdda-player cd-iccdump cd-paranoia
I genuinely only use three of those commands.
 |
| let's make some tab completions more complete |
Bash to the rescue:
It turns out the bash authors already thought of this. There’s an EXECIGNORE
variable that you can set, and it will filter things out. Look what happens when
you set it:
james@computer:~$ EXECIGNORE='*/py*:*/cd*'
james@computer:~$ cd
cd cdmkdir cdtmpmkdir
I rarely use any python things (and this is only an example) and I actually
don’t need any of those cd* commands in my $PATH. Pass in a colon
separated list of patterns to ignore, and magically things just work!
If you include this variable in your ~/.bashrc then it will load automatically
every time you open a new terminal.
Which cd commands are those?
If you noticed the cdmkdir and cdtmpmkdir commands and wondered why they
didn’t disappear, that’s because they’re mine!
james@computer:~$ which cdmkdir
cdmkdir ()
{
mkdir "$@" && cd "${@: -1}"
}
james@computer:~$ which cdtmpmkdir
cdtmpmkdir ()
{
cd `mktemp --tmpdir -d tmp.XXX`
}
Specifics:
From the manual:
A colon-separated list of shell patterns (see [Pattern Matching](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Pattern-Matching.html)) defining the list of filenames to be ignored by command search using `PATH`. Files whose full pathnames match one of these patterns are not considered executable files for the purposes of completion and command execution via `PATH` lookup. This does not affect the behavior of the `[`, `test`, and `[[` commands. Full pathnames in the command hash table are not subject to `EXECIGNORE`. Use this variable to ignore shared library files that have the executable bit set, but are not executable files. The pattern matching honors the setting of the `extglob` shell option.Conclusion:
I hope that makes your bash tab completion filtering easier!
Happy Hacking,
James
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