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rgb

Member

Registered: 2010-02-11

Posts: 24

Bash aliases auto-completing issue

It is possible to make bash's auto-completion to work with an alias? Like:

alias install="sudo pacman -S"
install firef[TAB]

ber_t

Member

From: Berlin, Germany

Registered: 2010-03-10

Posts: 214

Website

Re: Bash aliases auto-completing issue

I guess you already installed the bash-completion package and sourced /etc/bash_completion in your .bashrc?

Most of the bash completion abilities are provided by functions. For instance, the completion function for pacman is defined in /etc/bash_completion.d/pacman, which get's included by /etc/bash_completion.

To get the completion for your alias, you have to write a new wrapper function for _available_pkgs (also defined in that file):

_install_pkgs () {
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur=`_get_cword`
    _available_pkgs
}

Finally, you have to tell bash to use that function for your alias:

complete -F _install_pkgs install

Put both in your .bashrc or in /etc/bash_completion or in /etc/bash_completion.d/pacman, considering that the last two might get overwritten by an update.

demian

Member

From: Frankfurt, Germany

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 709

Re: Bash aliases auto-completing issue

you could also use zsh instead of bash which, iirc, comes with alias and pacman (command and package name) completion preconfigured.
Of course it has many other perks.

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