Re: Space vs. non-space separators in COMP_WORDBREAKS

[Chet Ramey]

On 12/16/21 6:56 PM, konsolebox wrote:
> If I have a function like
>
>      function _complete_something {
>          printf -v __ '%q ' "$@"
>          logger -p debug -t something "Args: $__"
>          logger -p debug -t something "$(declare -p COMP_WORDS)"
>      }
>
> And in COMP_WORDBREAKS I have '=' included in the assignment.

It's in the default value of rl_completer_word_breaks.

> And I execute this command:
>
>      complete -F _complete_something something
>
> After I type something like this
>
>      something --option=/something[TAB]
>
> I'll also get = in one of the arguments.
>
> This seems to mean that separators specified in COMP_WORDBREAKS that
> aren't spaces are also passed as an
> argument and stored in COMP_WORDS.  This surprised me a bit, and I
> think it would be helpful if this behavior gets documented as well.

Well, the documentation says the line gets broken into words the way
readline does it, and readline uses the characters in
rl_completer_word_breaks as delimiters but doesn't remove them from
the list. It just uses them as word separators to bound the word to be
completed.


--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/