❯ Guillaume Laforge

Auto-completion in a DOS console

geek groovy

When I’m on an old PC, what frustrates me a lot is when I can’t auto-complete file names or paths when I’m in a DOS Console. If your computer (an old Win2K box like I have at work) is not configured for completion, it’s easy to re-enable it by modifying two keys in the registry:

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor\PathCompletionChar

To both keys, assign an hexadecimal value representing the key used for completing statements. I’m quite used to the tab key for that purpose, so I set the hexadecimal value to 0x09.

Of course, I couldn’t resist to use Groovy and Scriptom (Windows ActiveX/COM bridge for Groovy I developed recently) to automate the process, here is how:

import org.codehaus.groovy.scriptom.ActiveXProxy

wshell = new ActiveXProxy("WScript.Shell")
wshell.RegWrite("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Command Processor\\CompletionChar", 9, "REG_DWORD")
wshell.RegWrite("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Command Processor\\PathCompletionChar", 9, "REG_DWORD")