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INSTALLATION ------------ The easiest way to install this software is to use a package; it is available in many operating system distributions. The package's name is usually bash-completion. Depending on the package, you may still need to source it from either /etc/bashrc or ~/.bashrc (or any other file sourcing those). You can do this by simply using: # Use bash-completion, if available [[ $PS1 && -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]] && \ . /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion (if you happen to have *only* bash >= 4.1 installed, see further if not) If you don't have the package readily available for your distribution, or you simply don't want to use one, you can install bash completion using the standard commands for GNU autotools packages: ./configure make make check # optional, requires dejagnu and tcllib make install # as root These commands installs the completions and helpers, as well as a profile.d script that loads bash_completion where appropriate. If your system does not use the profile.d directory (usually below /etc) mechanism, i.e. does not automatically source shell scripts in it, you can source the $sysconfdir/profile.d/bash_completion.sh script in /etc/bashrc or ~/.bashrc. The profile.d script provides a configuration file hook that can be used to prevent loading bash_completion on per user basis when it's installed system wide. To do this, turn off programmable completion with "shopt -u progcomp" in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bash_completion (~/.config/bash_completion if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set), and turn it back on for example in ~/.bashrc if you want to use programmable completion for other purposes. If you're using MacOS X, /etc/bashrc is apparently not sourced at all. In that case, you can put the bash_completion file in /sw/etc and add the following code to ~/.bash_profile: if [ -f /sw/etc/bash_completion ]; then . /sw/etc/bash_completion fi TROUBLESHOOTING --------------- If you find that a given function is producing errors under certain circumstances when you attempt completion, try running 'set -v' or 'set -x' prior to attempting the completion again. This will produce useful debugging output that will aid us in fixing the problem if you are unable to do so yourself. Turn off the trace output by running either 'set +v' or 'set +x'. KNOWN PROBLEMS -------------- I. There seems to be some issue with using the bash built-in cd within Makefiles. When invoked as /bin/sh within Makefiles, bash seems to have a problem changing directory via the cd command. A work-around for this is to define SHELL=/bin/bash within your Makefile. This is believed to be a bug in bash. II. Many of the completion functions assume GNU versions of the various text utilities that they call (e.g. grep, sed and awk). Your mileage may vary. III. If you are seeing 'unbound variable' warnings from bash when hitting <Tab>, this is because you have either 'set -u' or 'set -o nounset' somewhere in your start-up files. This causes bash to flag the use of any uninitialised shell variables as an error. Whilst we try to avoid references to uninitialised variables in the code, there seem to be at least some cases where bash issues this warning even though the variable in question has been initialised. One place this appears to occur is within the _muttconffiles() helper function used by mutt completion, where the function calls itself recursively. This seems to confuse bash and it issues spurious warnings if 'nounset' is set. FAQ --- Q. The bash completion code inhibits some commands from completing on files with extensions that are legitimate in my environment. Do I have to disable completion for that command in order to complete on the files that I need to? A. No. Use M-/ to (in the words of the man page) attempt file name completion on the text to the left of the cursor. This will circumvent any file type restrictions put in place by the bash completion code. Q. How can I insert my own local completions without having to reinsert them every time you issue a new release? A. Put them in ~/.bash_completion, which is parsed at the end of the main completion script. See also the next question. Q. I author/maintain package X and would like to maintain my own completion code for this package. Where should I put it to be sure that interactive bash shells will find it and source it? Install it in one of the directories pointed to by bash-completion's pkgconfig file variables. There are two alternatives: the recommended one is 'completionsdir' (get it with "pkg-config --variable=completionsdir bash-completion") from which completions are loaded on demand based on invoked commands' names, so be sure to name your completion file accordingly, and to include for example symbolic links in case the file provides completions for more than one command. The other one which is present for backwards compatibility reasons is 'compatdir' (get it with "pkg-config --variable=compatdir bash-completion") from which files are loaded when bash_completion is loaded. Q. I use CVS in combination with passwordless ssh access to my remote repository. How can I have the cvs command complete on remotely checked-out files where relevant? A. Define $COMP_CVS_REMOTE. Setting this to anything will result in the behaviour you would like. Q. When I'm running a ./configure script and completion returns a list of long options to me, some of these take a parameter, e.g. --this-option=DESCRIPTION. Running ./configure --help lists these descriptions, but everything after the '=' is stripped when returning completions, so I don't know what kind of data is expected as a given option's parameter. Is there a way of getting ./configure completion to return the entire option string, so that I can see what kind of data is required and then simply delete the descriptive text and add my own data? A. Define $COMP_CONFIGURE_HINTS. Setting this to anything will result in the behaviour you would like. Q. When doing tar completion on a file within a tar file like this: tar tzvf foo.tar.gz <Tab> the pathnames contained in the tar file are not displayed correctly. The slashes are removed and everything looks like it's in a single directory. Why is this? A. It's a choice we had to make. bash's programmable completion is limited in how it handles the list of possible completions it returns. Because the paths returned from within the tar file are likely not existing paths on the file system, '-o dirnames' must be passed to the complete built-in to make it treat them as such. However, then bash will append a space when completing on directories during pathname completion to the tar files themselves. It's more important to have proper completion of paths to tar files than it is to have completion for their contents, so this sacrifice was made and '-o filenames' is used with complete instead. If you would rather have correct path completion for tar file contents, define $COMP_TAR_INTERNAL_PATHS *before* sourcing bash_completion. Q. When completing on a symlink to a directory, bash does not append the trailing / and I have to hit <Tab> again. I don't like this. A. This has nothing to do with bash_completion. It's the default for completing symlinks to directories since bash 2.05a, and was added because sometimes you want to operate on the symlink itself, rather than what it points to. You can get the pre-2.05a behaviour back by putting 'set mark-symlinked-directories on' in your /etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc file. Q. Completion goes awry when I try to complete on something that contains a colon. A. This is actually a 'feature' of bash. bash recognises a colon as starting a new completion token, which is often what you want when completing something like a PATH variable: $ export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr<Tab> Without the special treatment of the colon, the above wouldn't work without programmable completion, so it has long been a feature of the shell. Unfortunately, you don't want the colon to be treated as a special case when doing something like: $ man File::B<Tab> Here, the colons make bash think that it's completing the a new token that begins with 'B'. Unfortunately, there's no way to turn this off. The only thing you can do is escape the colons with a backslash. Q. Why is rpm completion so slow with -q? A. Probably because the database is being queried every time and this uses a lot of memory. You can make this faster by pregenerating the list of installed packages on the system. Make sure you have a readable file called /var/log/rpmpkgs. It's generated by /etc/cron.daily/rpm on modern Red Hat and Mandrake Linux systems. If you don't have such a cron job, make one: #!/bin/sh rpm -qa --qf '%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}.rpm\n' 2>&1 \ | sort > /var/log/rpmpkgs rpm completion will use this flat text file instead of the RPM database, unless it detects that the database has changed since the file was created, in which case it will still use the database to ensure accuracy. Q. Can tab completion be made even easier? A. The readline(3) library offers a few settings that can make tab completion easier (or at least different) to use. For example, try putting the following in either /etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc: set show-all-if-ambiguous on This will allow single tab completion as opposed to requiring a double tab. This makes things much more pleasant, in our opinion. set visible-stats on This will suffix each returned file completion with a character denoting its type, in a similar way to ls(1) with -F or --classify. set page-completions off This turns off the use of the internal pager when returning long completion lists. Q. Is bash the be-all-and-end-all of completion as far as shells go? A. Absolutely not. zsh has an extremely sophisticated completion system that offers many features absent from the bash implementation. Its users often cannot resist pointing this out. More information can be found at: http://www.zsh.org/ CONTRIBUTING ------------ Contributions to the bash completion project are more than welcome. Fixes, clean-ups and improvements of existing code are much appreciated, as are completion functions for new commands. If you wish to contribute code, please bare the following coding guidelines in mind: - Do not use Perl, Ruby, Python etc. to do text processing unless the command for which you are writing the completion code implies the presence of one of those languages. For example, if you were writing completion code for perldoc(1), the use of Perl to achieve your goal would be acceptable. irb(1) completion would similarly make the use of Ruby acceptable. Even so, please consider alternatives to these large and slow to start interpreters. Use lightweight programs such as grep(1), awk(1) and sed(1). - Use the full power of bash >= 4.1. We no longer support earlier bash versions, so you may as well use all the features of that version of bash to optimise your code. However, be careful when using features added since bash 4.1, since not everyone will be able to use them. For example, extended globs often enable you to avoid the use of external programs, which are expensive to fork and execute, so do make full use of those: ?(pattern-list) - match zero or one occurrences of patterns *(pattern-list) - match zero or more occurrences of patterns +(pattern-list) - match one or more occurrences of patterns @(pattern-list) - match exactly one of the given patterns !(pattern-list) - match anything except one of the given patterns - Following on from the last point, be sparing with the use of external processes whenever you can. Completion functions need to be fast, so sacrificing some code legibility for speed is acceptable. For example, judicious use of sed(1) can save you from having to call grep(1) and pipe the output to cut(1), which saves a fork(2) and exec(3). Sometimes you don't even need sed(1) or other external programs at all, though. Use of constructs such as ${parameter#word}, ${parameter%word} and ${parameter/pattern/string} can provide you a lot of power without having to leave the shell. For example, if $foo contains the path to an executable, ${foo##*/} will give you the basename of the program, without having to call basename(1). Similarly, ${foo%/*} will give you the dirname, without having to call dirname(1). As another example, bar=$( echo $foo | sed -e 's/bar/baz/g' ) can be replaced by: bar=${foo//bar/baz} These forms of parameter substitutions can also be used on arrays, which makes them very powerful (if a little slow). - Prefer "compgen -W '...' -- $cur" over embedding $cur in external command arguments (often e.g. sed, grep etc) unless there's a good reason to embed it. Embedding user input in command lines can result in syntax errors and other undesired behavior, or messy quoting requirements when the input contains unusual characters. Good reasons for embedding include functionality (if the thing does not sanely work otherwise) or performance (if it makes a big difference in speed), but all embedding cases should be documented with rationale in comments in the code. - When completing available options, offer only the most descriptive ones as completion results if there are multiple options that do the same thing. Usually this means that long options should be preferred over the corresponding short ones. This way the user is more likely to find what she's looking for and there's not too much noise to choose from, and there are less situations where user choice would be needed in the first place. Note that this concerns only display of available completions; argument processing/completion for options that take an argument should be made to work with all known variants for the functionality at hand. For example if -s, -S, and --something do the same thing and require an argument, offer only --something as a completion when completing option names starting with a dash, but do implement required argument processing for all -s, -S, and --something. Note that GNU versions of various standard commands tend to have long options while other userland implementations of the same commands may not have them, and it would be good to have the completions work for as many userlands as possible so things aren't always that simple. - Do not write to the file-system under any circumstances. This can create race conditions, is inefficient, violates the principle of least surprise and lacks robustness. - Send small, incremental diffs that do one thing. Don't cram unrelated changes into a single diff. - Generate patches preferably against the git repository, with "git format-patch origin/master" (assuming the diff was against the origin/master branch), and send them preferably with "git send-email". If you don't have git available or can't access the repository for some reason, generate patches as unified diffs ('diff -u'). - If your code was written for a particular platform, try to make it portable to other platforms, so that everyone may enjoy it. If your code works only with the version of a binary on a particular platform, ensure that it will not be loaded on other platforms that have a command with the same name. In particular, do not use GNU extensions to commands like sed and awk if you can write your code another way. If you really, REALLY must use them, do so if there's no other sane way to do what you're doing. The "Shell and Utilities" volume of the POSIX specification is a good starting reference for portable use of various utilities, see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ - Read the existing source code for examples of how to solve particular problems. Read the bash man page for details of all the programming tools available to you within the shell. - Please test your code thoroughly before sending it to us. We don't have access to all the commands for which we are sent completion functions, so we are unable to test them all personally. If your code is accepted into the distribution, a lot of people will try it out, so try to do a thorough job of eradicating all the bugs before you send it to us. - File bugs, enhancement requests (preferably with patches attached) at the project tracker at https://alioth.debian.org/projects/bash-completion/ Sending them to the developers list usually works too, but bits are more likely to fall through the cracks that way compared to the tracker. - Use printf(1) instead of echo(1) for portability reasons, and be sure to invoke commands that are often found aliased (such as ls or grep etc) using the "command" (or "builtin") command as appropriate. -- bash-completion developers bash-completion-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org