20

Sometimes, when I type a command on the terminal, the terminal's autocomplete does not work, even if my command is not wrong.

For example, take look to this: sudo service vsftpd status sudo and service do not have any problem. I mean, when you type sud +tab terminal suggest you sudo or I type servi + tab terminal complete that to service. But for vsftpd I do not get any suggestion. Is there a way to say, "terminal, please tell me any suggestion!!?".

Braiam
  • 69,112
Mohammad Reza Rezwani
  • 10,706

6 Answers6

33

The degree to which auto-completion works is a function of how well the shell scripts in the bash-completion package work.

In Ubuntu 14.04, the script that handles completions for service is in /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion. It looks for service names as files in /etc/rc.d/init.d and /etc/init.d, and in the output of systemctl list-units --full --all.

But installing the vsftpd package doesn't put any files in /etc/init.d, because it has been systemd-ified; it puts a config file in /etc/systemd/system/vsftpd.service. systemctl list-units would find that file if not for the fact that Ubuntu, at the present time, doesn't include a systemctl command.

So, at the moment, you won't get auto-completions for service vsftpd, but you will for most other services, since their config files are in /etc/init.d.

Mark Plotnick
  • 1,009
11

When there are multiple possible suggestions, tab will not produce any suggestion. Using tab tab (double tab) will produce a list of all possible suggestions.

Dan
  • 6,784
6

vsftpd has probably more than 1 option. tab twice to view the possibilities.

Example: li with tabtab shows:

libnetcfg          line               lintian-info       lispmtopgm
libreoffice        linguist           linux32            listres
lightdm            link               linux64            
lightdm-session    lintian            linux-boot-prober
Rinzwind
  • 309,379
4

You can build your own!

E.g.: put complete -f -r -c su -d 'Username' -a '(cat /etc/passwd|cut -d : -f 1)' into bash than if you have su and press tab/tab it gives you all users, yeah. See here

elf12
  • 173
0

The services command relies on "systemctl list-units --full --all", and does not list services that are unable to start (or disabled as above), to confirm if you experiencing this issue you can run 

systemctl status <service_name>
sparks
  • 101
0

I've found that systemctl list-units --full --all does not list disabled services, so autocompletion doesn't

# check if enabled
systemctl is-enabled <service_name>
# enable
systemctl enable <service_name>
Lluís
  • 103