In Linux, when you run a program through bash, you can use Tab to speed up the input of parameters that need to be transferred to this program. How to make auto-completion work in my program?

2 answers 2

microsample.

let's do for our (non-existent) program autocompletion of options -a , -b and parameter c :

 $ complete -W "-a -bc" x

check. enter x , then a space, then the tab character twice and see the proposed options:

 $ x <tab><tab> -a -bc

In order for this to work in each session, the ( complete ... ) command can be added to the end of the ~/.bashrc .

to autocomplete file / directory names, you can, for example, add the -f option to the complete command:

 $ complete -f -W "-a -bc" x

and then you need to read the documentation ( https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Programmable-Completion-Builtins.html ) and look at the examples (with the current versions of the bash / bash-completion package - in the directory /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/ )

    as an option you can see examples in the directory

     /etc/bash_completion.d/*

    The 16 UBUNTU autocomplete programs are located in the directory

     /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/

    More details here.