Source Guru

Ok, so recently, Richard Johnson and Michael Lustfield blogged about tab completion for SSH hosts.

I’m an avid user of zsh, and have my own way of doing this (liberally stolen from Daniel Silverstone).

Now, this requires a little setup to start with, as some Linux Distributions have a habit of creating “hashed” known_hosts files.  So, what I’ve done, is before I ever SSH into a host, I add the following line to my ~/.ssh/config

HashKnownHosts no

From here, I can then add the following line to my ~/.zshrc

zstyle -e ':completion::*:*:*:hosts' hosts 'reply=(${=${${(f)"$(cat {/etc/ssh_,~/.ssh/known_}hosts(|2)(N) /dev/null)"}%%[# ]*}//,/ })'

Now, when I try and ssh into a host, I can use tab completion to complete any host I’ve previously ssh’d into and any new hosts I ssh into get automatically added to the list

And so it should – it’s an awesome shell.

Anyway, I’ve just spent a lot of time sorting out my zsh so it does titles in the right way. By this, I mean changing the title of your xterm window, and/or your screen window.

Anyway, here’s the code that I use for my zsh titles

precmd () {
 case $TERM in
 screen)
 print -Pn "\e]0;%n@%m: %~\a"
 print -Pn "\ekzsh: %~\e\\"
 ;;
 xterm*|rxvt)
 print -Pn "\e]0;%n@%m: %~\a"
 ;;
 esac
}

preexec () {
 case $TERM in
 screen)
 print -Pn "\e]0;%n@%m: $1\a"
 print -Pn "\ek$1\e\\"
 ;;
 xterm*|rxvt)
 print -Pn "\e]0;%n@%m: $1\a"
 ;;
 esac

}

I find this works in the same way that the default bash shell does though – it also works quite nicely with screen, and sets the screen titles for you too

Also – my prompt lines are (inspired by Daniel Silverstone circa 2005)

export RPROMPT='%B%d%b %t '
export PROMPT='%B%n@%m %#%b '

Happy zsh’ing folks!