How to force windows cmd tab complete to add a trailing slash to directory names

The answer these days is PowerShell. It is superset of the windows command line. It has many of the Linux commands. It has an object-based pipeline and has full access to the .NET framework from the command line.

And it adds a trailing slash when using tab to expand a directory name.

No there is no such setting. Your best bet is to use bash through cygwin but I expect you already knew that bit.

this is quite an old thread but I thought it might still be helpful for others.

I could not find a parameter in Windows to do the trick but I found a executable (GNU, with the Pyton source available) named PyCmd which is an improvement (according to my and my work habits) to regular CMD console.

It can be launched by double click it and it starts a regular console with cmd.exe and it loads itself in the memory to allow a lot of command line editing goodies, among them the same TAB completion behaviour I used to have under Unix Korn Shell (including the Emacs-like keys) with the trailing slashes or back-slaches for directories.

You can find it at:https://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/

The last version is a December 2017 snapshot (but stable for me, could not meet any major trouble compared to the 2013 0.9 stable release), at:https://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/files/pycmd/snapshots/

You can also launch it from an existing console, from CMD.EXE and it starts a sub shell with all its editing goodies. You exit this sub-shell by exit or ^D on an empty line.

Note that I have tested it to under an alternative console like "Hyper" (MIT License, at https://hyper.is/ and https://github.com/zeit/hyper), which I prefer compared to Windows default console, and it works perfectly with it too. I think it's fair to assume that it will work well for other consoles like ConEmu or others, but I did not test it with them.

This answer goes perhaps a little far beyond the original question but -- I hope -- still can provide some help to people like me who like to get the same kind of command-line behaviour as they used to have under Unix Korn shell (possibly Linux bash, I don't know).

Have a nice command line interface to all!

GM