Tab completion in a BASH script

K

Kryyll

Guest
I completely changed the way I was making a BASH script to decompress compressed files and I decided that I wanted to list all the compressed files in the current directory and then you can choose the one you want. However, it is a HUGE pain to have to enter in the entire file name. Is there anyway to enable tab completion within a script?
 


There is a minimally-documented command called "compgen" that expands an argument to generate completion matches. Unfortunately there is no man page for it and the --help option offers very little help (at least on SuSE 11). You can probably search the interwebz for more info, but using the -G option (glob pattern) seems to match info in the current directory:

Code:
#!/bin/bash

echo -n "Enter beginning of match: "
read i

x=`compgen -G "${i}*"`

echo "$x"

Usual wildcards apply so you can add another * to the beginning of the argument (${i}) to match files/folders with the string anywhere in the name.

This is the closest thing to auto-complete that I know about in shell scripts
 

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