Perlbrew Bash Completion

Basic tab completion for perlbrew.

Usage

This completion script, executes perlbrew list and offers completions for all the perlbrew perls and libraries installations you have available.

$ perlbrew use <tab>
perl-5.10.1
perl-5.20.2
perl-5.20.2@workflow
...

And the bash completion functionality even assists, when you specify more of your targets

$ perlbrew use perl-5.20<tab>
perl-5.20.2
perl-5.20.2@workflow
...

Download

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonasbn/bash_completion_perlbrew/master/perlbrew > perlbrew

Installation

Where your completions are located might vary.

Personal

If you want to install them for your personal use, do the following.

Create the file: ~/.bash_completion, containing the code below:

for bcfile in ~/.bash_completion.d/* ; do
    . $bcfile
done

Ref: ServerFault.com: Standard place for user defined bash_completion.d scripts?

Create a directory for your completions:

$ mkdir ~/.bash_completion.d

Copy your completions into the newly created directory:

$ cp perlbrew ~/.bash_completion.d/

Start a new shell and you should be good to go.

System-wide example from Debian

Based on an introduction to bash completions on Debian.

$ sudo cp perlbrew /etc/bash_completion.d/

System-wide example from OSX

This assumes you are using Homebrew

Do note that paths vary based on whether you are using bash 3 or 4

bash 3 (Formula: bash-completions)

$ cp perlbrew /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/

And to activate right away:

$ source  /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/perlbrew

bash 4 (Formula: bash-completions2)

$ cp perlbrew /usr/local/share/bash-completion/completions/

And to activate right away:

$ source /usr/local/share/bash-completion/completions/perlbrew

Motivation

I have a huge list of perlbrew library installations and I tend to keep the names long and descriptive, so it seemed like tab completion was an interesting alternative to the flow breaking copy-pasting and error prone typing away.

The programmatic capabilities of bash are truly powerful and useful and can be put to good use in use-cases like this.

See Also

A more elaborate piece of documentation on bash completions is available from The Linux Documentation Project in the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide.

From the GNU Documentation.

Good two-part article, "An Introduction to Bash Completion": Part 1 and Part 2.

Please note that this experimental implementation has only been tested with bash version 3.

The most comprehensive collection of bash completions I have come across is the one from the Debian Linux distribution. It is also the one offered for OSX via Homebrew.

License

This is made available under the MIT license, see separate license file.

Copyright

©️ jonasbn 2016-2020