Restricting MSYS (Bash) auto-completion to current directory

Question

I'm using MSYS on Windows 7 and I really enjoy the TAB auto-completion feature of the bash console. However it appears that this feature queries all directories in Windows' $PATH variable, requiring me to narrow down my choice considerably.

Is there a way to have bash only consider files within the current directory?

Answer 1

In bash (and all other shells that have auto-completion as far as I know), when you start typing the name of a command and hit Tab, the shell will search through the directories in the $PATH and return the commands whose name starts with what you typed. That way, you can run a command without having to be in the same directory where that particular executable is located. This makes your life much much easier.

If you are only interested in executable files in the current directory, just add a ./ to the beginning of the name you type. ./ means the current directory (at least on *nix systems, I'm not sure if they've changed the format when porting to windows) so bash will try to expand file names in the current directory:

$ ls
foo.pl
$ foo <TAB> ## lists many possible completions
$ ./foo <TAB> ## only lists foo.pl