bash tab completion filter out options

Question

I would like to make tab completion in bash a bit more intelligent.

Let's say I have a folder with a src file .lisp, and a compiled version of that file .fasl. I would like to type vi filename [tab tab], and the .lisp autocompletes as the only option. That is, it's not likely that I want vim to open a compiled binary, so don't have it in the list of autocomplete options to cycle through.

Is there a way that I can keep a flat list of extensions that autocomplete ignores, or somehow customize it for vim, so that autocomplete ignores only particular file extensions when a bash command starts with vi ...

Any ideas are appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

From man bash:

FIGNORE

A colon-separated list of suffixes to ignore when performing filename completion. A filename whose suffix matches one of the entries in FIGNORE is excluded from the list of matched filenames. A sample value is ".o:~" (Quoting is needed when assigning a value to this variable, which contains tildes).

So, for your example this can be set in your .bashrc file with

FIGNORE=".o:~:.fasl"

or, if you want to keep any other site-wide settings:

FIGNORE=".o:~:.fasl:$FIGNORE"

Answer 2

The bash complete command seems to be what you want.

Here is a Linux Journal link to 'complete' command video. and here is the follow-up page More on Using the Bash Complete Command

The links explain it quite well, and here is a related SO Question/Answer: Bash autocompletion across a symbolic link