Re: bug-bash Digest, Vol 232, Issue 27

[Chet Ramey]

On 3/31/22 4:44 PM, Jeremy Gurr wrote:
> I have put together my own bash debugger (I like it better than the
> others I've seen), and wanted to have variable name auto completion in
> the 'read' built-in, just like it is in the base command line. Is
> there a reason that bash uses a readline that is differently
> configured in the 'read' builtin versus the full featured
> autocompletion available in readline at the command line? Would this
> be a difficult thing to implement?

The completion available to the `read' builtin is readline's default
completion, which is what's appropriate in the vast majority of cases.

The fix/enhancement is to add an option to `read', similar to `-e', so that
using it would result in `read' using bash's command line completion
mechanism instead of readline's default.

This is the second request for something like this, and I'm looking at it
for the next release after bash-5.2 (which is currently in alpha testing).

--
``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/