Looking for key-bound auto-completed arg buffer in readline/bash.

[David Weeks]

Hello All,

I first wrote the help-bash@gnu.org list, thinking this was already a 
feature, but I've not found it.

On occasion, I have to clean up some seriously broken filenames, full of 
control chars, code points, and whatnot, filenames that my perl script 
gives up on.  That script cleans 99%, and I could forever tweak it for 
yet-another-exception-case, but they are really random.  So I fix them 
by hand.

Because they are full of PITA chars, I use auto-complete to uh, 
auto-complete them.  Which is a PITA, cause I'm having to escape and 
otherwise manually code point these PITA chars.  So if once I've 
auto-completed the first case for mv -nv, I'd like to repeat it, and 
then fix the copy as needed.  Right now, I have to do the exact same 
thing twice, to get something that's already on hand, the just 
auto-completed arg.

So that variable is in memory, and if we had as a feature, a persistent 
buffer that logged those completions, that was bound to a key-sequence, 
say C-TAB, then once I've picked/auto-completed the filename, I can 
C-TAB to paste/yank in the second instance, suitable for renaming the 
PITA filename.  (Remember too, these are one and only commands, so 
history is useless.)

This doesn't seem like it would be hard to do (famously dangerous 
words), and present it here.


David Weeks
Information Developer

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Making technology useful.