I was working on some functions in bash to make my life easier and realized that if I added custom completion to my functions, it will be really good. So I headed over to google and searched for what I wanted. I did get a lot of information on bash completion but not a single concrete example that could help me do what I wanted. So, with the help of man pages and some results from the Google pages, I was finally able to accomplish what I wanted. So here it is:

Google link that might help here.

What : Change to config file directory. The structure of directory looked something like this

somedirectory

| —- a

| —-| —-config

| —-b

| —-| —-config

and so on..

Solution

Create a function in the .bashrc

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      _conf()<br /> <br /> {<br /> <br /> local curw<br /> <br /> local PATH="somedirectory"<br /> <br /> COMREPLY=()<br /> <br /> curw=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}<br /> <br /> COMPREPLY=( $(cd $PATH/; compgen -W $(ls -d $curw*)) )<br /> <br /> return 0<br /> <br /> }
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

And then add the completion to .bashrc

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    <div class="text codecolorer">
      complete -F _conf conf
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

compgen can be used with in-built functions to define completions with users, directories or with “-W” to complete with custom words.

and complete is used to define the function (_conf) to use with the command (conf).

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