How to get Linux autocompletion with numbered menu?

Question

I've been trying to find this for a couple of days now and while I am aware that I can write a bash function to get it the way I want, I am sure that this option comes out of the box.

I have recently upgraded to RHEL 7.11 and in previous RHEL versions when using double tab it would display a numbered menu when I had ambiguous options.

Consider this, I have a directory with the following files:

abc  abcd  abcde  abcdef  abcdefg  abcdefgh  abcdefghi

So when I type:

cat abc [tab][tab]

And there were multiple matches, I would get:

1) abc
2) abcd
3) abcde
4) abcdef
5) abcdefg
6) abcdefgh
7) abcdefghi

Subsequently I could type '7' and [tab] and it would concatenate the file at the option 7).

This is super useful when there are a lot of similar options with many files starting with the same characters (as is the case on my server where file names are preceded with system names for clarity).

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I recommend https://github.com/junegunn/fzf, I started to replace all my in-shell menu choices with this GREAT tool.

It has bash support, batteries included.