[WalterGR]

In the recent history sh(1) has gain the missing features for it to become a usable interractive shell:

- command completion

- ...

Too much bloat for my tastes.

[ogogmad]

What's the harm?

I'm guessing your alternative is:

  echo $PATH | sed 's/:/\n/g' | xargs ls | grep command_im_looking_for

[1500100900]

Additionally, an empty element in this context means $PWD

[breakfastduck]

I mean, preferences are preferences but you can hardly call command completion 'bloat'

[cranekam]

I assumed this was sarcasm and I am surprised to read all the serious replies.

[bombcar]

Doesn’t command completion cause a disk scan? Which can be a problem if the system is failing in some way and you’re trying to recover.

[jl6]

Can you not just avoid activating a completion attempt if you are in that scenario?

[forgotmypw17]

I think it is not as easy as you imply, especially if it is bound to muscle memory.

Side note: https://www.google.com/search?q=don%27t+say+just

[ed25519FUUU]

What percentage of your time do you spend on a shell on a host where the disk is failing and tabbing could cause a catastrophic disk read vs being on a perfectly healthy system where tab complete is a nice feature?

[bombcar]

What percentage of your time do you spend logged in as root? ;)

[Hello71]

unless you're exclusively running shell built-ins, doesn't running any command at all potentially cause a disk scan

[nyuszika7h]

Usually the shell creates a cache of commands on start, which can be refreshed with `hash -r`.

[yissp]

As far as I can tell the hash table is initially empty after you first start the shell. At least, that's the case for bash.

  $ hash
  hash: hash table empty

[xtracto]

Reminds me of the times I've had run out of space in a Linux system. When you SSH to the system and press TAB for command completion, all you get is some message regarding "the system running out of space".

[jmclnx]

Maybe in sh type shells. In csh/tcsh commands are hashed, so command completion is in memory. Thus the need for rehash.

There is a new setting in tcsh to allow for automatic rehash, but I have it disabled.

[mst]

hash -r in bash. No idea if there's a setting, I'm too used to doing the rehash as required to've noticed if there was.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Can install dash from ports collection. Should work fine as scripting shell in place of this one.

[commandersaki]

I would avoid this for root.