Linux command to list all available commands and a

Question

Is there a Linux command that will list all available commands and aliases for this terminal session?

As if you typed 'a' and pressed tab, but for every letter of the alphabet. Or running 'alias' but also returning commands.

Why? I'd like to run the following and see if a command is available:

ListAllCommands | grep searchstr

Answer 1

it depends, by that I mean it depends on what shell you are using. here are the constraints I see:

1. must run in the same process as your shell, to catch aliases and functions and variables that would effect the commands you can find, think PATH or EDITOR although EDITOR might be out of scope. You can have unexported variables that can effect things.
2. it is shell specific or your going off into the kernel, /proc/pid/enviorn and friends do not have enough information

I use ZSH so here is a zsh answer, it does the following 3 things:

1. dumps path
2. dumps alias names
3. dumps functions that are in the env
4. sorts them

here it is:

feed_me() {
    (alias | cut -f1 -d= ; hash -f; hash -v | cut -f 1 -d= ; typeset +f) | sort
}

If you use zsh this should do it.

Answer 2

Here's a function you can put in your bashrc file:

function command-search
{
   oldIFS=${IFS}
   IFS=":"

   for p in ${PATH}
   do
      ls $p | grep $1
   done

   export IFS=${oldIFS}
}

Example usage:

$ command-search gnome
gnome-audio-profiles-properties*
gnome-eject@
gnome-keyring*
gnome-keyring-daemon*
gnome-mount*
gnome-open*
gnome-sound-recorder*
gnome-text-editor@
gnome-umount@
gnome-volume-control*
polkit-gnome-authorization*
vim.gnome*
$

FYI: IFS is a variable that bash uses to split strings.

Certainly there could be some better ways to do this.

Answer 3

compgen -c > list.txt && wc list.txt

Answer 4

Alternatively, you can get a convenient list of commands coupled with quick descriptions (as long as the command has a man page, which most do):

apropos -s 1 ''

-s 1 returns only "section 1" manpages which are entries for executable programs.

'' is a search for anything. (If you use an asterisk, on my system, bash throws in a search for all the files and folders in your current working directory.)

Then you just grep it like you want.

apropos -s 1 '' | grep xdg

yields:

xdg-desktop-icon (1) - command line tool for (un)installing icons to the desktop
xdg-desktop-menu (1) - command line tool for (un)installing desktop menu items
xdg-email (1)        - command line tool for sending mail using the user's preferred e-mail composer
xdg-icon-resource (1) - command line tool for (un)installing icon resources
xdg-mime (1)         - command line tool for querying information about file type handling and adding descriptions for new file types
xdg-open (1)         - opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application
xdg-screensaver (1)  - command line tool for controlling the screensaver
xdg-settings (1)     - get various settings from the desktop environment
xdg-user-dir (1)     - Find an XDG user dir
xdg-user-dirs-update (1) - Update XDG user dir configuration

The results don't appear to be sorted, so if you're looking for a long list, you can throw a | sort | into the middle, and then pipe that to a pager like less/more/most. ala:

apropos -s 1 '' | sort | grep zip | less

Which returns a sorted list of all commands that have "zip" in their name or their short description, and pumps that the "less" pager. (You could also replace "less" with $PAGER and use the default pager.)

Answer 5

shortcut method to list out all commands. Open terminal and press two times "tab" button. Thats show all commands in terminal

Answer 6

The problem is that the tab-completion is searching your path, but all commands are not in your path.

To find the commands in your path using bash you could do something like :

for x in echo $PATH | cut -d":" -f1; do ls $x; done