Bash – Writing a tab completion script for bash

autocompletebashshellshell-script

I made a shell script that reads input from user and kills a process. But in bash if the user presses Tab key then bash suggests some keyword or file names. My script however doesn't suggest anything.

How can I enable tab completion for my script ?

Best Answer

The easy way is to install bash-completion (or whatever else your distribution calls it), write a completion script, and put it in /etc/bash_completion.d. A basic completion script looks like this:

have cancel &&
_cancel()
{
    local cur

    COMPREPLY=()
    _get_comp_words_by_ref cur

    COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "$( lpstat | cut -d' ' -f1 )" -- "$cur" ) )
} &&
complete -F _cancel cancel

This is for the cancel command from cups. Read about COMPREPLY and compgen in the manual for bash, and adapt it to your needs.

Related Solutions

Bash – How to change the target directory for tab completion

This might get you there...

Enable custom tab completion in your .bashrc
```
shopt -s progcomp
```

Create a compgen function and add it to .bashrc after your notes functions.

_notes() {
local cur
    cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -f $HOME/n/$cur | cut -d"/" -f5 ) )
    }
   complete -o filenames -F _notes n

This works for me - at the basic level. I still haven't solved it for nested directories...

References:

most of it from here: http://sixohthree.com/867/bash-completion
Completion builtin details here: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Programmable-Completion-Builtins.html

Bash – How to fix this SSH hostname tab completion script

The known_hosts file by default usually contains hashed entries which bash_completion can't parse.

You can edit your ssh_config (/etc/ssh/ssh_config) to set:

HashKnownHosts no

Then you'll probably need to clear your current known hosts file:

> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – How to change the target directory for tab completion

Bash – How to fix this SSH hostname tab completion script

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