TIP: Make bash tab completion ignore .svn directories

Mar 16, 2010 • pcl

Having to tab through the fifty million otherwise empty “net/mycompany/project/unit/subunit” directories that the Java ecosystem necessitates has consistently driven me crazy because completion stops at each step to let me choose the .svn directory, and I have to look and type the first letter of the directory I actually want to make it continue.

It’s actually really easy to fix this:

export FIGNORE=.svn

$FIGNORE is just a colon-separated list of suffixes to ignore when doing tab completion.

CB 2010-07-08 01:18:54 PM

thx mate^^ annettte (who apparently met u in nippon) gave me this address and look here, reading a few entries and already updated my bashrc :) hope it works

Jameson Williams 2011-09-06 09:57:22 PM

Ah! Good ol’ FIGNORE. Thanks, +1, etc.

Tomek 2012-04-11 10:56:18 AM

thanks! this makes my life much easier

Tim 2013-01-11 04:32:49 PM

Actually it should be export FIGNORE=svn (the dot is already implied)

pcl 2013-01-11 04:47:35 PM

If you leave the dot off it will ignore anything that ends with svn.

% ls ./<tab>
hisvn/    svn/      .svn/     svn-test/ test/     test-svn/

% export FIGNORE=svn 
% ls ./<tab>
svn-test/ test/

pcl 2013-01-11 10:45:35 PM

I noticed a Stack Overflow post where some other people were seeing a similar discrepancy, so I glanced at the source and I think I see the source of the confusion:

static int
name_is_acceptable (name)
     const char *name;
{
  struct ign *p;
  int nlen;

  for (nlen = strlen (name), p = fignore.ignores; p->val; p++)
    {
      if (nlen > p->len && p->len > 0 && STREQ (p->val, &name[nlen - p->len]))
        return (0);
    }

  return (1);
}

Note that the length of the path being checked must be greater than the length of the item in FIGNORE. So FIGNORE=.svn will not reject an entry that is just .svn

The catch is that leading path components are considered as part of the name. Example:

% ls <tab>
Breakpoint 1, name_is_acceptable (name=0x71d510 ".svn") at bashline.c:2536

% ls .<tab>
Breakpoint 1, name_is_acceptable (name=0x73dcb0 "./.svn") at bashline.c:2536

So, FIGNORE=.svn will only ignore the directory .svn when there are leading path components.

punit 2013-07-16 05:50:29 PM

Awesome. Thanks.