Get autocompletion when invoking a "read" inside a Bash script

bash bash-completion
Wolkenarchitekt picture Wolkenarchitekt · Jan 27, 2011 · Viewed 15.8k times · Source

Inside my Bash script, I'm reading some variables entered by the user with read:

read -p "Glassfish Path:" GF_DIR

Now I want that the user gets a autocompletion when he has to enter a directory, like when you are on the Bash shell. So when he enters the first letters of a directory, he can autocomplete it by hitting TAB. Is that possible?

Answer

miku picture miku · Jan 27, 2011

Try:

read -e -p "Glassfish Path:" GF_DIR

-e enables readline:

 -e 
    If the standard input is coming from a terminal, Readline is used
    to obtain the line.

Related questions

Running bash commands in the background without printing job and process ids

To run a process in the background in bash is fairly easy. $ echo "Hello I'm a background task" & [1] 2076 Hello I'm a background task [1]+ Done echo "Hello I'm a background task" However the output is verbose. On the first line …

Read More
A confusion about ${array[*]} versus ${array[@]} in the context of a bash completion

I'm taking a stab at writing a bash completion for the first time, and I'm a bit confused about about the two ways of dereferencing bash arrays (${array[@]} and ${array[*]}). Here's the relevant chunk of code (it works, by the …

Read More
Git completion and PS1 not working: "__git_ps1: command not found" on "sudo -s" or "sudo su" on Ubuntu 12.04

I installed git and git-flow completion adding these line to .bashrc of root and a normal_user on a Ubuntu 12.04 machine: source /etc/git-completion.bash source /etc/git-flow-completion.bash GIT_PS1_SHOWUPSTREAM="verbose" GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=true PS1='\[\033[32m\]\…

Read More