13 Aug 2008

Auto complete with tab in DOS

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:

1234567_~
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C:\>cd DownloadsC:\Downloads>cd nant-0.85C:\Downloads\nant-0.85>cd binC:\Downloads\nant-0.85\bin>_~
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</tr>
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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:
123_~
</td>
C:\>cd Downloads\nant-0.85\binC:\Downloads\nant-0.85\bin>_~
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>

About the author

I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.