It's also common in OSX that many programs can be executed from the shell, so many program names that you'll find in /Applications can also be called via a CLI from the shell.

If Bash if your shell, it will spew out similar information for all commands or a single command if you press Tab Tab.

You can use the open command in OSX for quite a few things, for example.Ĭompgen -c executes the command in a subshell environment, and its output is used as the possible completions, which is probably what you want. My experience is that it will not list everthing, like applications typcially ran in the GUI, which I will mention below. So it is interesting that technically compgen is listing commands, aliases, and functions, as well as a few other things like builtins, variables, groups, jobs and service names. Like fd0 commented above, the best source for quickly listing most everything you can do in the Terminal, is by using the Bash builtin compgen.Ĭompgen interfaces with the 'completion' function in Bash, so it is intended to keep a list of most everything you can do in the shell.

Get full list of commands for terminal