Making cd in bash a little better

Quick tips are random posts regarding something I discovered on my way to something bigger. They usually get longer than “quick” would imply, for which I refuse to apologize.

The Bash command cd is pretty good with tab completion (though not as good as Z shell). I often want to complete a path like ~/Scripts/, though, and get caught up on directories such as ~/ScriptingAdditions, which I never need to get to through Terminal. There’s an easy way to ignore those pesky directories, though, using the $FIGNORE variable.

In my .bash_profile, I just include:

export FIGNORE="Application Scripts:Applications (Parallels):ScrivWatcher:ScriptingAdditions"

The directories listed in $FIGNORE will always be ignored by cd tab completion. Problem solved.