Question

In Bash, if I press the tab key twice, then I see:

Display all 1092 possibilities? (y or n)

Snippet:

!         diff              ifconfig      mount.fuse        rcsdiff       tiff2pdf
./        diff3             ifdown        mount.ntfs-3g     rcsmerge      tiff2ps
:         diffutils-cmp     ifenslave     mount.ntfs-fuse   rdisc         tiff2rgba
GET       diffutils-diff    iftop         mountpoint        rdjpgcom      tiffcmp
HEAD      diffutils-diff3   ifup          msgattrib         read          tiffcp
MAKEDEV   diffutils-sdiff   ifup-local    msgcat            readelf       tiffdiff
POST      dig               igawk         msgcmp            readlink      tiffdither
[         dir               igd-client    msgcomm           readonly      tiffdump
--More--

I thought that if I searched for all the executable files in the directories in my $PATH environment variable, then that would produce a single column list matching the data that more displays.

Here’s my first attempt:

echo $PATH | sed -e 's/:/ /g' -e "s/^/find / " | sh > commandlist.txt
wc -l commandlist.txt
1114 commandlist.txt

So I added -xtype f and -perm /u=x but still don’t get 1092:

echo $PATH | sed -e 's/:/ /g' -e "s/^/find / " -e "s/$/ -xtype f -perm \/u=x/" | sh | wc -l
1107

How does double tab key press in Bash generate its total ‘possibilities’ value?

Answer 1

this seems to work:

compgen -cab | sort | uniq | wc -l

on my machine it shows the same number as the tab complete thing.