Access to shell completions.

[mchav]

Been trying to do this for a while to no avail.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4726695/bash-and-readline-tab-completion-in-a-user-input-loop

[wilhelmtell]

Maybe the solution is not to have your own REPL, but to hook up to bash command execution? I've never done that, I wonder if that's possible.

Is this interesting?

[mchav]

@wilhelmtell so use preexec to get a list of all the completions? Definitely an interesting option. It saves us having to use an external tool like rlwrap or writing a custom c program. It does seem a little unsafe though. I'm thinking of just writing a c program to do the work.

[wilhelmtell]

rlwrap won't help. What I meant is, you want to stay in the user's environment, in the user's bash prompt. This way, all the user's settings are there -- including their completions, their bash prompt, their word expansions, everything. All you want to do is prefix their commands, that's it. Not take the command from them, not provide completion for them, not provide a prompt for them. If you stay out of the REPL, you don't need to worry about any of these.

So, googling for that, I found that hint about hooking up to the bash command execution. So I wondered if it's possible to set up a hook that is run before any command bash executes, that gives you the command prior to executing it, and allows you to alter it.

Then, you'd need two commands, rather than a with and an EOF: one command to hook onto the command execution, and one to unhook.

[mchav]

Alright. That's what I was looking into. It seems running exec with xdotool and the prompt + \t\t can get a list of completions. And once we have those it's a matter of sending them back to the main shell via a file and using the list of completions.

Not sure how you could hook bash in the same process.

[mchav]

If possible the solution must not use external tools.

[dragonator]

I've been working on this for the last week or something and I think I have a working solution.
It is not perfect but I think that it is pretty good for start.

The last thing that is left is to move the cursor to the appropriate place after a word completion is made.

Does anybody have an idea how this can be done?

[dragonator]

Hello again,

I just create a "Pull request" with working implementation: #34

I hope you find it useful.

I'm new to bash scripting and this was quite of a challenge for me, but I'm glad that I manage to get it working.
I'll be very happy if someone can provide me his personal feedback on the changes and/or propose improvements.

[mchav]

@dragonator I'm currently looking through the code. Your pull request seems great though. Thank you. I think I'll bump it up to version 0.0.2 after the code review.

[mchav]

It seems that now we don't have file name completion.