Outer Web Thought Log
June 08, 2004
bash tab completion trick

Don't you love a tidy and logically traversable directory structure? I'm happy with the Google philosophy: just index and search, but my fellows love deeply nested hierarchies resulting in file paths such as applications/daisywiki/frontend/src/cocoon/webapp/daisy/resources/cforms/htmlarea/plugins/BlockSwitcher/block-switcher.js - which, combined with these obnoxious CVS directories spread over my sandbox, become a nightmare to navigate, even with bash tab completion.
I've been annoyed by this for a long time, but only today I used all-mighty Google which learned me the following trick: export FIGNORE=CVS. Lovely!

Posted by stevenn at June 8, 2004 01:31 PM ()
Comments

Awesome tip!

Posted by: Sylvain Wallez at June 8, 2004 03:26 PM

Thank you! Those CVS directories were a pain the way they slowed down my tab-tab-tabbing. Now I just need something like tab-autocompletion for climbing back up the tree.

Posted by: Tim Larson at June 8, 2004 06:51 PM

Nice tip :)
@Tim: How about ../[press TAB] to navigate back up the tree?

Posted by: Jorg Heymans at June 8, 2004 10:18 PM

That tries to tab-complete with files one directory up. What I want is something that will type ../ for me with one keystroke, to make cd ../../../../ quicker to type.

Posted by: Tim Larson at June 9, 2004 06:33 AM

On solution is to type "bash" (or whatever shell you like) before decending deeply in the directories. Then you can just type "exit" to pop way back up the directory tree.

Posted by: Tim Larson at July 6, 2004 05:17 AM