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Questions tagged [compgen]

A bash built-in command to generate command completions.

compgen is a built-in command used to define automatic tab-completion behaviour for options, filenames and other positional arguments to shell commands.

It's intended to be used from within a shell function generating possible completions, which is then used by the complete builtin to define a completion specification or compspec.

See also: Bash Reference Manual: Programmable Completion

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How do I autocomplete nested, multi-level subcommands?

I am trying to develop an autocomplete or tab-complete feature for my own set of commands. For example, assume foo is my binary: CLI>> foo [TAB] [TAB] It should show the main commands configure and…
Puneeth
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Listing all variables in a file in bash

When writing bash scripts I like to write self contained functions which take an argument and perform operations based on that/those argument(s) rather than have global variables being declared in several different places in the code decreasing…
Alexandre Thenorio
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Command to list all available commands in Windows Command Prompt

I’d like to programmatically get a list of all the available commands in Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe). Is there something like compgen -c in Bash, but for Windows?
Mathias Bynens
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specify another directory to compgen for auto completing directories, than using pwd

compgen -d -- $cur will suggest completions for the directories in pwd only right? Can I get it to suggest directory completions for some dir while being in another dir. For eg. if I am in /curr_dir, and I want to generate directory completions for…
udiboy1209
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Simulate Bash's COMPREPLY response without actually completing it

Steps to reproduce Create directory on tmp, add 1 file inside. mkdir /tmp/testdir && touch /tmp/testdir/examplefile Paste below script on /tmp/completion.sh # BEGIN AUTOCOMPLETE function _foo_complete() { local comnum cur opts [[…
Liso
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Can code injection be done using eval in this code?

This is my first time using bash and I know that eval have some risks when using it. Can you do a code injection to this ? For example I want to run ls command and see the files. #!/bin/bash echo "[*] Please enter the name:" echo -n "> " read…
Fish
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autocomplete boost program options

after hours of search I ended up writing my first stackoverflow question. I want to create a completion function for a bash script, so far so good ;). This bash script calls other executables that have their own autocompletion. Example: $ my_script…
Tobias
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how does bash do `ssh` autocompletion?

I've got the "bash-completion" package installed. ssh completion on the command line (in bash) is working: ssh TAB-TAB will complete past used hosts and ssh -TAB-TAB will complete available ssh options. However when I search for currently defined…
Tomáš Pospíšek
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Is it possible to make a bash script that delegates completion to another program?

I'm trying to write a wrapper script around another program (e.g. foo_wrapper around foo), which simply overrides some flags on every call to foo. I want users to be able to interact with foo_wrapper and foo exactly the same way, including seeing…
karagog
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Subprocess library won't execute compgen

I am trying to make list of every command available on my linux (Lubuntu) machine. I would like to further work with that list in Python. Normally to list the commands in the console I would write "compgen -c" and it would print the results to…
xlogic
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Globbing filenames from file using compgen

I'm simplifying a messy Bash script that synchronizes directories and their contents and files among several machines on a network using rsync. The script gets file names, directory names, and glob patterns from a sources.txt file with contents like…
Al Pacifico
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How does this bash completion function work? (for cloudfoundry cli)

I try to understand this bash completion function ? (for cloudfoundry cli) I read https://debian-administration.org/article/317/An_introduction_to_bash_completion_part_2 and also the bash ref guide at…
mhoff
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How to make bash autocomplete work in the middle of line?

How to write autocomplete in bash, so that if I have: mycommand first_argument|garbage where | denotes the cursor, it should pass "first_argument" and not "first_argumentgarbage" to compgen? In the examples I have it behaves in the wrong…
pihentagy
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Use compgen to get autocomplete for another command, which flag to use?

I have a custom auto-completed command (call it commandA) in commandB I want to steal the autocomplete options for the first argument to commandA So, for example the options for argument1 for commandA are: abcdef abcabc abc123 I would like something…
Chris
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Compgen doesn't complete words containing colons correctly

I'm encountering a problem with creating a Bash completion function, when the command is expected to contain colons. When you type a command and press tab, Bash inserts the contents of the command line into an array, only these arrays are broken up…
Lou
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