Here are a series of posts I put up on the Apple discussion board
about tab completion. I think I now know what the problem is, but am
reluctant to change anything until I'm sure the changes won't screw up
my Fink installation. First I posted this:
I'm currently studying the Peachpit book on OSX Support Essentials
and have just arrived at the section concerning tab completion in
the Terminal. According to the book, if I start from my home folder,
then type P, and then press the Tab key, I should get all the
choices available to me within the home folder that start with P. I
tried this and it worked for me once. Now, however, after
restarting, if I do the same thing, I get only one choice -
PPCExplain, which is located in Developer/usr/bin/, and not in my
home directory. Thinking a preferences must have gotten screwed up,
I deleted the preferences for the Terminal, and restarted - still I
get this one result and have no explanation of why this command
worked as the book said it would and now it doesn't. I'm quite
positive I'm starting from my user folder. Any idea what's going on
here? Thanks.
Then I got a number of replies, the most useful of which was:
Your terminal is working correctly. In unix-based systems, tab
completion is situation-dependent, and for the most part is relative
to the root of the drive. If you open a terminal and type P<tab> it
will list all commands that are included in your $PATH variable. The
$PATH contains file locations (starting from the drive's root) for
all the commonly used utilities. To see what the $PATH contains,
type the following command in the terminal:
echo $PATH
This command will output something like: /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/
sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin
All the paths listed there are targeted when you enter a command.
When you press "P<tab>" the system looks for something in these
directories that begins with a "P". The terminal assumes "/usr/
bin/", "/bin", and the other paths have already been entered, so
typing "P" just completes the path from there.
I then replied:
Thank you for your thorough explanation. The $PATH variable was
particularly helpful. The output on my Mac shows this:
/sw/bin:/sw/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/bin:/
bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
The /sw directory is related to my Fink installation and I think
that's the reason the P (tab) command is bringing up items in the
Developers folder initially. Someday when I feel the need I'll edit
this, but if you'd be so kind, what's the name of the file to edit?
It was so long ago that I edited it that I can't remember.
Obviously I edited this file somewhere along the way to try to get
mysql working and also Fink. My question now is...can I edit this file
and make it so that when I try to use terminal tab completion I don't
end up defaulting to the Developers folder and still use Fink
successfully? If so, how should I do this?
Thank you for any help.
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