Mark Needham

Thoughts on Software Development

Auto complete with tab in DOS

with one comment

It's becoming quite a couple of weeks of learning for me around DOS and I have another tip that I just learnt today.

I always found it really frustrating when using the windows command prompt that I couldn't get Unix style tab auto completion. To navigate my way to a directory I would do the following:

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C:\>cd Downloads

C:\Downloads>cd nant-0.85

C:\Downloads\nant-0.85>cd bin

C:\Downloads\nant-0.85\bin>

It is very tedious as you might imagine. I would try placing a forward slash after each directory in the hope that it would allow me to scroll through the next directory down but to no avail.

Little did I know that in fact I needed to be using the backslash. The above can now be done in one line using Unix style tabbing auto completion:

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C:\>cd Downloads\nant-0.85\bin

C:\Downloads\nant-0.85\bin>

Written by Mark Needham

August 13th, 2008 at 11:55 pm

One Response to 'Auto complete with tab in DOS'

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  1. What's wrong. There are the RoR fan boys, the python fan boys. Now MSDos. Now that's progress :P

    Ketan Padegaonkar

    14 Aug 08 at 4:37 am

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