Shells like bash do wildcard expansion on tab keystroke. So you type cat version*.txt then tab and it expands that into cat version1.txt version2.txt v

Shells like bash do wildcard expansion on tab keystroke. So you type cat version*.txt then tab and it expands that into cat version1.txt version2.txt version3.txt The same is of course true with any other kind of wildcard like *.tar.gz (is that what you mean with reverse tab completion?) And even ranges like "version{1..3}" and much more. Look up http://bash-hackers.org http://bash-hackers.org, the ultimate guide for shell globbing and other bash features.