How to make tab completion append slash for directory symlinks?

Question

My ~/Documents directory is a symlink:

nathan@nathan-desktop:~$ stat Documents
  File: Documents -> /mnt/nathan/extended/Documents

If I want to cd into the directory, I can type:

c d space D o c tab

...and tab completion will append uments to the end of cd Doc as expected. However, it does not append a trailing /, even though the symlink points to a directory.

Is there a way to make Bash do that?

Answer 1

Enable the mark-symlinked-directories option for READLINE. There are few ways to do that:

1. Customize your readline by putting commands in an .inputrc file:

   • Create or edit ~/.inputrc and add these lines:

     $include /etc/inputrc
     set mark-symlinked-directories on
     

   • Log-in/Log-out or press ctrl+x and ctrl+r to reload the settings.

2. Customize your readline by putting commands in the .bashrc file (or in the .profile file):

   • Edit ~/.bashrc and add this line:

     bind 'set mark-symlinked-directories on'
     

   • Log-in/Log-out or source the file:

     source ~/.bashrc
     

3. Customize the readline for all users by creating a .sh file into the directory /etc/profile.d:

   • Create a file /etc/profile.d/mark-symlinked-directories.sh which should looks like:

     #!/bin/sh
     bind 'set mark-symlinked-directories on'
     

     Executable permissions to this file are not needed.

   • Log-in/Log-out. That's it.

Further reading:

• READLINE section in the manual page of Bash
• The source of the first two ways
• The source of the idea for the third way

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One simple way that I found is double tab for completion:

c d space D o c tab tab

The first tab will append uments, the second one will append / and the third will print the list of contained directories.