I work with many randomly-named servers and pop into a few open source hosts with some frequency. I was getting somewhat irritated with typing out so many hostnames
, but a search on Google showed many results. It seemed the most common command to do this was this.
complete -W "$(echo `cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sed -e s/,.*//g | uniq | grep -v "\["`;)" ssh
It does a pretty crappy job of actually scanning your known_hosts file and seems to only marginally do what it’s supposed to. If you’re like me you also tend to be involved with rearranging many servers. This causes issues to because the simplest fix for the key verification is to delete the known_hosts file. This means your tab complete won’t work anymore.
My method is create a file (~/.ssh/hosts). On each line I add a host that I want to exist in my tab complete.
Example:
server1.domain.com
server2.domain.com
server3.domain.com
It’s white space that matters so you could have it all on one line and
just have a space between each if you want. Next, add this line to your
~/.bashrc file:
complete -W "$(<~/.ssh/hosts)" ssh
I just added it to the end of the file. Either reload your shell or type bash.
Now do ssh <tab><tab>. See how pretty that is? :)
Alternatively, you could edit your ~/.ssh/config file to include aliases.
~/.ssh/config:
# parens
Host parens
Hostname parens.domain.tld
User michael
Host fw
Hostname firewall.domain.tld
User admin
If you have the complete command available, then it’s likely that any Host in
this file will already be auto-completed using tab. This is done using the file
/usr/share/bash-completion/completions/ssh.