filenames shortcut?

[petrasflorin]

hei, is there any way of abbreviating a filename ?

for example I wanna run a movie
terminal: cd Downloads
ls -l
cd Dark.Island.720p.play-On
mplayer Dark.Island.720p.play-On.avi


is there any way of just doing mplayer Dark.Island ?

I know I can do mplayer /Downloads/Dark.Island.720p.play-On/Dark.Island.720p.play-On.avi

but what I'm asking is abbreviating filenames with something like.... intuitive guessing ? typing maybe mplayer Dark.Island-- and the terminal guesses the rest of the filename ? sucks having to type all those numbers.

[mikewhatever]

You can type 'mplayer Dark.Island' and hit the 'Tab' key to autocomplete.

[WorMzy]

Press tab to autocomplete in a shell.

e.g.

cd Dark.[TAB]

will autocomplete to:

cd Dark.Island.720p.play-On

(assuming that there's no other filenames beginning with "Dark.", and you're using bash/zsh; I don't think it works in dash, and I haven't tried any other shells)

zsh has an amazing autocomplete system. I can type

cd /h/w/D/inc[TAB] and it'll autocomplete to:

cd /home/wormzy/Downloads/incomplete

(cd /h/w/D/in[TAB] matches incomplete and installers, and gives me the option to cycle between them with additional tab presses)

[NFblaze]

You can also file glob. Using wildcards and such


such as


mplayer Dark*.avi

"*" will match anything that begins with Dark and ends with .avi in that directory.

This is especially useful for seasons such as totem Dexter.S01*.mkv

[petrasflorin]

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you !

[nothingspecial]

Another good one is Esc .

That will print the last argument to the last command

so

mkdir holiday_photos

Then

cd 'Esc .'

That means type cd then hold down escape and press the full stop/period button.