Linux command to list all available commands and aliases

Question

Is there a Linux command that will list all available commands and aliases for this terminal session?

As if you typed 'a' and pressed tab, but for every letter of the alphabet. Or running 'alias' but also returning commands.

Why? I'd like to run the following and see if a command is available:

ListAllCommands | grep searchstr

Answer 1

Why don't you just type:

seachstr

In the terminal.

The shell will say somehing like

seacrhstr: command not found

EDIT:

Ok, I take the downvote, because the answer is stupid, I just want to know: What's wrong with this answer!!! The asker said:

and see if a command is available.

Typing the command will tell you if it is available!.

Probably he/she meant "with out executing the command" or "to include it in a script" but I cannot read his mind ( is not that I can't regularly it is just that he's wearing a mind reading deflector )

Answer 2

There is the

type -a mycommand

command which lists all aliases and commands in $PATH where mycommand is used. Can be used to check if the command exists in several variants. Other than that... There's probably some script around that parses $PATH and all aliases, but don't know about any such script.

Answer 3

in debian: ls /bin/ | grep "whatImSearchingFor"

Answer 4

You can always to the following:

1. Hold the $PATH environment variable value.
2. Split by ":"
3. For earch entry: 
    ls * $entry 
4. grep your command in that output.

The shell will execute command only if they are listed in the path env var anyway.

Answer 5

Use "which searchstr". Returns either the path of the binary or the alias setup if it's an alias

Edit: If you're looking for a list of aliases, you can use:

alias -p | cut -d= -f1 | cut -d' ' -f2

Add that in to whichever PATH searching answer you like. Assumes you're using bash..

Answer 6

The problem is that the tab-completion is searching your path, but all commands are not in your path.

To find the commands in your path using bash you could do something like :

for x in echo $PATH | cut -d":" -f1; do ls $x; done

Answer 7

Try to press ALT-? (alt and question mark at the same time). Give it a second or two to build the list. It should work in bash.

Answer 8

Try this script:

#!/bin/bash
echo $PATH  | tr : '\n' | 
while read e; do 
    for i in $e/*; do
        if [[ -x "$i" && -f "$i" ]]; then     
            echo $i
        fi
    done
done

Answer 9

Here's a function you can put in your bashrc file:

function command-search
{
   oldIFS=${IFS}
   IFS=":"

   for p in ${PATH}
   do
      ls $p | grep $1
   done

   export IFS=${oldIFS}
}

Example usage:

$ command-search gnome
gnome-audio-profiles-properties*
gnome-eject@
gnome-keyring*
gnome-keyring-daemon*
gnome-mount*
gnome-open*
gnome-sound-recorder*
gnome-text-editor@
gnome-umount@
gnome-volume-control*
polkit-gnome-authorization*
vim.gnome*
$

FYI: IFS is a variable that bash uses to split strings.

Certainly there could be some better ways to do this.

Answer 10

maybe i'm misunderstanding but what if you press Escape until you got the Display All X possibilities ?

Answer 11

Add to .bashrc

function ListAllCommands
{
    echo -n $PATH | xargs -d : -I {} find {} -maxdepth 1 \
        -executable -type f -printf '%P\n' | sort -u
}

If you also want aliases, then:

function ListAllCommands
{
    COMMANDS=`echo -n $PATH | xargs -d : -I {} find {} -maxdepth 1 \
        -executable -type f -printf '%P\n'`
    ALIASES=`alias | cut -d '=' -f 1`
    echo "$COMMANDS"$'\n'"$ALIASES" | sort -u
}

Answer 12

Here's a solution that gives you a list of all executables and aliases. It's also portable to systems without xargs -d (e.g. Mac OS X), and properly handles paths with spaces in them.

#!/bin/bash
(echo -n $PATH | tr : '\0' | xargs -0 -n 1 ls; alias | sed 's/alias \([^=]*\)=.*/\1/') | sort -u | grep "$@"

Usage: myscript.sh [grep-options] pattern, e.g. to find all commands that begin with ls, case-insensitive, do:

myscript -i ^ls

Answer 13

it depends, by that I mean it depends on what shell you are using. here are the constraints I see:

1. must run in the same process as your shell, to catch aliases and functions and variables that would effect the commands you can find, think PATH or EDITOR although EDITOR might be out of scope. You can have unexported variables that can effect things.
2. it is shell specific or your going off into the kernel, /proc/pid/enviorn and friends do not have enough information

I use ZSH so here is a zsh answer, it does the following 3 things:

1. dumps path
2. dumps alias names
3. dumps functions that are in the env
4. sorts them

here it is: feed_me() { (alias |cut -f1 -d= ;hash -f; hash -v |cut -f 1 -d= ; typeset +f)|sort}

If you use zsh this should do it.

later

marc

Answer 14

You can use the bash(1) built-in "compgen"

• "compgen -c" will list all the commands you could run.
• "compgen -a" will list all the aliases you could run.
• "compgen -b" will list all the built-ins you could run.
• "compgen -k" will list all the keywords you could run.
• "compgen -A function" will list all the functions you could run.
• "compgen -A function -abck" will list all the above in one go.

Check the man page for other completions you can generate.

To directly answer your question:

compgen -ac | grep searchstr

should do what yout want.