How do I find commands/files in my PATH through tab completion using wildcards?

Question

After some years of "BASHing", I've wrote several custom scripts. Most of them I don't use on a daily basis, so it's easy to forget how I've named them, as consistent as I might try to be.

So I know that if I'm intending to run my FLAC2MP3.bat, I just write FLA +TABTAB, and there I have a list of what Bash could find in my $PATH:

FLAC2MP3.bat FLAC2MP3.bat~ FlashPlayerApp.exe FlashPlayerCPLApp.cpl

Is it possible to do the same kind of searching but writing *MP3* (or anything similar) to search for any files that match the pattern on my PATH? When I do write that and press TAB (once or twice), basically nothing happens.

What I've already tried:

• Although it's not identical to my question, I've tried the answers for "How do I let bash autocomplete wildcards?". They seem to only relate to completions on the current dir contents, which is not my case at all.
• This answer to an almost similar question (but not involving wildcards) seemed like a good idea: using find on $PATH. Although it's not as practical as pressing TAB, it could be a solution. However, I almost got crazy and had no success with variable expansion, since my PATH (as most of Cygwin PATHs) has spaces into some directories, and expansion inserts single quotes when finding them (find \'${PATH/:/\' \'}\' -maxdepth 1 -iname mp3 -print -quit). In reality, I've lost so much time trying to make this work that it could almost be a separate question.

Answer 1

Switch to zsh. Make sure your .zshrc includes the line

setopt glob_complete

Enjoy.

Answer 2

Would

ls `echo $PATH | sed s@ @\\ @g | sed s@:@ @g` | grep [string]

accomplish what you need, on both counts? sed s@ @\\ @g should replace $PATH entries that have spaces in them with the readable escaped space and sed s@:@ @g should replace the colons separating $PATH entries with a normal space which allows ls to individually list the contents of each directory, which can be passed into grep which recognizes regex searching like the wildcards you want to use. This works as far as I can tell in native Bash, but I'm not sure if it will work in Cygwin's Bash.

If it does work out, you can always alias it so it is less cumbersome to use.

Answer 3

I don't have an answer to your primary question but I got curious about your second "what I've already tried" item and so far the best I can do to get that working with a single command, no subshell is:

IFS=: find_path=(${PATH}) && find "${find_path[@]}" <your_find_params>

This is ugly and proves that single-command/no-subshell is probably not worth the effort. Per Stephane's comment below you can instead do something like

(IFS=:; set -f; find $PATH <your_find_params>)

Edit: Of course this doesn't handle the case of a newline embedded in a path component but who cares...we're living in the real world. :)