Auto complete by end/middle of line in bash

Question

In bash is there a quick way to do tab auto-completion based on the middle of a word.

So for example, if I have these files in a directory:

001_apple.txt 002_pear.txt 003_dog.txt

I would like to type the sequence: *d<TAB> to auto-complete 003_dog.txt.

Can this be done in bash? Is it easier to do in other shells?

Answer 1

You can substitute `ls *d*` to achieve the same effect, not quite as convenient as tab-completion however

Answer 2

Try ESC-g for glob expansion.

And you should always install the bash-completion package (included by default often, but you need to source it in your bash profile script).

Answer 3

Looks like zsh does this plus quite a bit more. See: expand-or-complete-prefix and COMPLETE_IN_WORD options.

Fish also does this really nicely out-of-the-box.

Answer 4

ls *d*<TAB>

works in bash. Not sure if that's what Ben meant. ls could of course be any other command.

Answer 5

I think this is a feature of readline (may even not the default keybinding):

type "ls *middle*", then type "ctrl-x, *" will replace "*middle*" with the files that match the pattern.