auto-completion does not work for “sudo apt-get install”

Question

Okay a college of mine just showed me that you could do

sudo apt-get install <type first letters of package> <TAB>

That it auto-completes the name of the package. Just for an example...

sudo apt-get install ged<TAB> results in sudo apt-get install gedit

Now I tried to do this but this does not work for me.

How can I solve this? Do I have to install a package? My college told me that he didn't install anything extra for it.

Answer 1

Bash does support some more kinds of autocompletion, not only filename completion.

In the file /etc/bash.bashrc, you will find a paragraph, like this or similiar to this:

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
#if ! shopt -oq posix; then
#  if [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
#    . /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion
#  elif [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
#    . /etc/bash_completion
#  fi
#fi

(this example is from debian, but is probably identical to the Ubuntu version)

By removing the # character in the beginning of each line you put a lot of additional completion rules into effect. (Don't remove the # on the first line... thats really a comment ;-)

I believe apt-get completions are among those enabled with this. If not you could think about switching to zsh. I know they support it ;-)

Answer 2

this happens to me when either:

1. I use my university pc where I can't use the autocomplete because am not a super user.

2. The ppa of the package that you are trying to download is not in your source.list. So the terminal can't recognize the package that you are trying to download.

NOTE: This may not apply to everyone. Am just sharing my experience

Answer 3

In Ubuntu it started to irritate me too, so I just did (in terminal):

gksu gedit /etc/bash.bashrc

and changed

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
#if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then
#    . /etc/bash_completion
#fi

into

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then
    . /etc/bash_completion
fi

now it works like I want it to again... HTH :)

It is different from the example Paul Hänsch gave, mine came from ubuntu 12.04. I am not sure what Pauls version would do exactly, maybe he could elaborate on that a bit?