How to enable tab completion of wildcards in bash?

Question

How can I enable tab completion in bash for a statement such as vim db/migrate/*crea? Essentially I am looking for tab completion to match the regular expression and present the options.

How would one go about doing this?

This questions relates to one I asked here

Answer 1

What version of bash are you using? For me with 4.1.2, it seems to work out of the box on CentOS 6.2:

[user@host foo]$ cd /tmp/foo
[user@host foo]$ mkdir bar
[user@host foo]$ touch bar/foo{1,2,3}
[user@host foo]$ vim bar/*1
*TAB*
[user@host foo]$ vim bar/foo1 
[user@host foo]$ touch bar/bar1
[user@host foo]$ vim bar/*1
*TAB* *TAB*
[user@host foo]$ vim bar/*1
bar1/ foo1  

Are you making sure to tap TAB twice for the auto-completion list?

Answer 2

show-all-if-ambiguous makes pressing tab once (instead of twice) show all completions. It also changes the way globs are completed:

$ touch 1.0.{1,2}
$ bind 'set show-all-if-ambiguous off'
$ open *0* # I pressed tab twice here, and *0* was kept as *0*
1.0.1  1.0.2
$ open *0*^C
$ bind 'set show-all-if-ambiguous on'
$ open *0* # I pressed tab once here, and *0* was replaced with 1.0.
1.0.1  1.0.2
$ open 1.0.

glob-complete-word (\eg) would also complete *0 (without a wildcard at the end) to 1.0.. It also works with patterns like */file* and **/file.