Line completion with custom commands

bash unix customization autocomplete
pistacchio picture pistacchio · Jan 9, 2009 · Viewed 11.3k times · Source

my Python program can be launched with a range of different options (or subcommands) like:

$ myProgram doSomething
$ myProgram doSomethingElse
$ myProgram nowDoSomethingDifferent

I want it to use auto-completion with so that if i type "myProgram d" it returns "myProgram doSomething" and if i type "myProgram n" it renders "myProgram nowDoSomethingDifferent". This is similar to the average use of the module rlcompleter, but it does not pick possible completion options from the filesystem (or from history) but from a custom set of strings (that correspond to the available options for my program)

Any idea on how to implement this?

I'm aware of the variable PYTHONSTARTUP (that should point to a file I don't know how to write).

As a working example, django-admin (from the django package) has the same exact feature i'm looking for

Answer

richq picture richq · Jan 9, 2009

Create a file "myprog-completion.bash" and source it in your .bashrc file. Something like this to get you started...

_myProgram()
{
  cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
  case "${cur}" in
    d*) use="doSomething" ;;
    n*) use="nowDoSomethingElse" ;;
  esac
  COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "$use" -- $cur ) )
}
complete -o default -o nospace -F _myProgram  myProgram

Related questions

How can I check if a directory exists in a Bash shell script?

What command can be used to check if a directory exists or not, within a Bash shell script?

Read More
Looping through the content of a file in Bash

How do I iterate through each line of a text file with Bash? With this script: echo "Start!" for p in (peptides.txt) do echo "${p}" done I get this output on the screen: Start! ./runPep.sh: line 3: syntax error …

Read More
How to permanently set $PATH on Linux/Unix?

I'm trying to add a directory to my path so it will always be in my Linux path. I've tried: export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/dir This works, however each time I exit the terminal and start a new terminal …

Read More