Bash – Hide make targets from shell when users autocomplete in bash

autocompletebashmake

Is there a way to flag some targets in a Makefile so that they don't appear at all in the shell when the user types make and then presses Tab ?
I am having a Makefile with too many recipes and I don't want them all to appear in the shell autocompletion when a users presses Tab looking for targets.

Best Answer

After studying the problem and coming up with a solution that I wrote in the first answer, I realized that there is another very simple way.

Just start the target's names you don't want to show beginning with a dot.

Example:

.PHONY: foo .hiddentarget
foo: foo.x .hiddentarget
foo.x: foo.c
        touch foo.x
.hiddentarget: foo.x
        echo foo.x ok, I believe

And that's all you need!

I came to this idea after trying to figure out how to prevent a target named .HIDDENGOALS being called by mistake and run all hidden goals. :)

Warning Although I don't see any, I'm not sure if there isn't any side effect on using target names like this ".targetname" (starting with a dot).

Related Solutions

Shell – TAB autocomplete in Bourne Shell

(No answer to your exact question, but many workarounds.)

You don't need to match your scripting shell with your interactive shell. (For example, most (t)csh or zsh users write sh scripts). If you have or can install a better interactive shell than the Bourne shell (zsh, bash, tcsh), go for it. Even if you can't, look if there's a ksh, which is likely to have slightly better interactive features than a Bourne shell.

You can check what character the tab key sends by entering echo ' Ctrl+V Tab ' | od -t x1 Enter. 0000000 09 0a (i.e. at position 0, two characters, a tab and a newline) is the expected output. I don't expect this to be the issue.

If you can't get a comfortable environment, you could try doing more things remotely, using your local machine for interaction as much as possible. This has its ups and downs.

From Linux (or most other unices including OSX, but not from Windows), you can use sshfs to access the remote filesystem.
Within Emacs, you can easily browse remote files via Tramp (open /os390hostname:/path/on/remote/machine, you get completion). You can also use Eshell to get a remote shell interface (an Emacs built-in shell); if you change to a remote directory (cd /os390hostname:/path/on/remote/machine), the external commands you launch will be executed on the remote machine. If you need to run commands as root, Tramp (and Eshell which is based on it) can combine ssh with su or sudo.

Bash – Make BASH’s Tab Completion Fill In First Match

Add the following to your .inputrc file, (exact location varies between systems):

"\C-i": menu-complete

This maps TAB to menu-complete, which auto-completes the first match.

Then add (or uncomment) show-all-if-ambiguous, this shows the list of possible completions on the first TAB press.

For example, in your (possibly) .inputrc file:

# On RHEL 8.3 - $HOME/.inputrc
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
"\C-i": menu-complete

Alternatively, you can set menu-complete per session (without editing .inputrc) by doing

bind '"\C-i" menu-complete'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – TAB autocomplete in Bourne Shell

Bash – Make BASH’s Tab Completion Fill In First Match

Related Question