How do I get a list of all available shell commands

Question

In a typical Linux shell (bash) it is possible to to hit tab twice, to get a list of all available shell commands.

Is there a command which has the same behaviour? I want to pipe it into grep and search it.

Answer 1

You could use compgen. For example:

compgen -c

You also could grep it, like this:

compgen -c | grep top$

Source: http://www.cyberciti.biz/open-source/command-line-hacks/compgen-linux-command/

Answer 2

You can list the directories straight from $PATH if you tweak the field separator first. The parens limit the effect to the one command, so use: (...) | grep ...

(IFS=': '; ls -1 $PATH)

Answer 3

"tab" twice & "y" prints all files in the paths of $PATH. So just printing all files in PATH is sufficient.

Just type this in the shell:

 # printf "%s\n" ${PATH//:/\/* } > my_commands

This redirect all the commands to a file "my_commands".

Answer 4

List all the files in your PATH variable (ls all the directories in the PATH). The default user and system commands will be in /bin and /sbin respectively but on installing some software we will add them to some directory and link it using PATH variable.