Re: Exclude builtins from command completion

[Chet Ramey]

On 1/9/20 3:17 PM, kaycee gb wrote:
> Hello,
>
> For one of my projects which works with bash completion, I'm looking for a way
> to exclude bash builtin commands from the completion proposals. I already had
> success with exclusion of commands from PATH.
>
> After playing with options for complete -b/-c, compgen -b/-c, these commands are
> still displayed when I type first 2 letters then <TAB><TAB>
>
> # sh<TAB><TAB>
> shift shopt show
>
> I want that it matches just the last one.
>
> I even tried with actions from complete enabled/disabled builtins without luck.
> I'm not sure how actions work.
>
> My bash version is 4.2.053-x86_64-2_slack14.1.
>
> How can I achieve what I want to do ?

You can't do it on bash-4.2 (which is approximately nine years old) without
a lot of work.

It's pretty easy to do in bash-5.0. This script will do pretty much what 
you want:

buildpat()
{
        builtins_pat=

	set -- $(printf "%q " $(compgen -b -k "$1"))	# to leave reserved words, 
omit -k
        [ $# -gt 0 ] && builtins_pat='@('"$(IFS='|' ; echo "$*")"')'
}

commandcomp()
{
        local builtins_pat w

        w="$2"
        buildpat "$w"
        
        if [ -n "$builtins_pat" ]; then
                COMPREPLY=( $(shopt -s extglob ; compgen -c -X "$builtins_pat" 
"$w") )
        else
                COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -c "$w") )
        fi
}

complete -I -F commandcomp


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