Re: Issue with bash completion

Hi Ed, I think I understand the issue and have a solution. Comments are always welcome. :) On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko(a)greshko.com&gt; wrote: Since bash 4.1, bash complete builtin supports the -D option. It lets you specify a default completion function which takes the calling command as the first argument. Using this facilty one can setup dynamic completion loading. This resolves long shell starting time issues with heavy use of the bash completion package. Since bash-completion 1.99 (default for F17) support for the old method has been removed completely (which also means it doesn't support < Bash 4.1, i.e. SLC5, RHEL5 et al). By default the _completion_loader is used to dynamically load completion functions. If you are using completion functions for other utilities for your wrappers, these are unavailable until _completion_loader has been invoked for the utility once; hence completion on the wrapper fails for the very first try. The work wround is to define a custom completion loader yourself that sources the appropriate files for your wrappers and falls back to the _completion_loader otherwise. So in this particular case the following works very well: # custom completion loader function _custom_completion_loader() { local cmd=$1 case $cmd in find_ext) { declare -F _find &> /dev/null || \ source /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/find \ &> /dev/null; } && complete -F _find find_ext ;; *) _completion_loader $cmd esac return 124 } # default completion function that wraps around _completion_loader complete -D -F _custom_completion_loader I hope this helps someone in the future. -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.