Peter Dempsey asked
> In an Xterm, if I press the escape key four times I get a list of
> commands. If I type pp and press the escape four times I get a list of
> commands beginning with pp. My shell is Bash.
>> What's all this about?...
It's called command completion. In bash the TAB key is normally used for
command/filename completion which means that when you've typed enough of
a command (first non white space on a line) to uniquely identify it you can
press TAB and bash fills in the rest automatically. A similar process is used
when you give a filename on the command line. If what you've typed is not
enough to uniquely identify a command or a filename, bash will beep when you
press TAB and if you press it agin, it will give you a list of possible matches
and if there's a large number of matches, it will ask if you want to see them all.
This feature is one of the things bash inherited from the C shell but there you
press esc-esc instead of TAB so bash supports that as well.
> Where is it documented?
man bash would be a good start.
Kindest regards,
Niall O Broin
UNIX Network Administrator nobroin at esoc.esa.de
Ground Systems Engineering Department Ph./Fax +49 6151 90 3619/2179
European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany
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