Bash: always display file possibilities on tab-complete

Question

When I use tab for filename completion and there are more than ~100 matches, it displays something like "Display all 403 possibilities? (y or n)". This gets annoying when I do it many times a day. Is there a way to always display all completions instead of this prompt? Or even better, set the threshold above which it displays the prompt?

Answer 1

You can set the threshold by adding a line like this to your ~/.inputrc file:

set completion-query-items 1000

The default is 100 and 0 appears to set no limit. This is documented in the bash(1) man page.