Enable Autocomplete for root on Mac OS X

December 18, 2012Updated on November 22, 2024 JS Morisset Mac OS X

Are you frustrated by the lack of autocomplete in root’s shell on Mac OS X? I’ve tried a few different solutions, and the easiest / simplest I found is to create an /etc/inputrc file (chown root:wheel and chmod 644) with the following text.

"\C-i": complete

The /etc/inputrc file is used by readline — the input-related library used by bash and most other shells. GNU’s readline init file syntax page documents all the available settings, and Gerard Beekmans Linux initrc file page shows a common initrc for Linux.

Autocomplete SSH Hostnames

September 20, 2012Updated on November 23, 2024 JS Morisset Bash, UNIX (Generic)

There are plenty of SSH autocomplete (or command-line completion) scripts available on the web, but I found most don’t go far enough — they usually just parse the ~/.ssh/known_hosts, ignoring the ~/.ssh/config and /etc/hosts files. Some of these scripts also generate a static autocomplete list at login, and can’t include new hostnames added during the session. The following script uses a function call to autocomplete hostnames dynamically, and fetches hostnames from the ~/.ssh/known_hosts, ~/.ssh/config and system-wide /etc/hosts file.