How do I turn off or adjust the clever tab completion in Ubuntu (Programmable Completion)

Question

When I am running various commands on the command line in Ubuntu and use tab-completion for files. The only files I am given are ones which have the appropriate extension for the command I am running. For example..

xmms <tab><tab>

would list all the mp3's in the current directory and not any jpegs.

Most of the time this is quite useful. But if the file you want happens to have an incorrect extension, or the extension is valid but the tab completion doesn't think it is then it won't list the file or complete to it. So

1. Is there a way to turn this feature off (just dumbly complete to any file regardless).
2. How do you adjust the extensions that are valid for a particular command.

Thanks

Peter

Answer 1

comment out these lines in /etc/bash.bashrc (it may be in ~/.bashrc):

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
 . /etc/bash_completion
fi

Answer 2

This is called "Programmable Completion" in bash. Use <tab> to attempt programmable completion, or use M-/ to attempt the default completion (usually files and directories). See also: http://spikeypillow.com/item/30/catid/4

Answer 3

The most elegant way to disable programmable completion should be to add:

shopt -u progcomp

to your .bashrc file. For more details, see the official documentation about the shopt command: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Shopt-Builtin.html

Answer 4

To change the completion behaviour, just edit /etc/bash_completion. Scroll down to where you find the list of programs and associated extensions. It should be pretty self-explanatory from there.

Answer 5

I put

complete -r

as last line of my .bashrc.
That discards all loaded completions and makes the shell 'dumb' again.