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I am attempting to use bash-completion for URLs of the form "proto://host". Without the ":", I see expected behavior, with the ":" present, the URL comes out "faulty".

Bash completion has a function for hostnames, _known_hosts_real. It has a parameter -p PREFIX that I want to use.

How to reproduce "wrong" behavior:

You need at least one "known" host on your system:

E.g. echo "gdns.google 8.8.8.8" >> /etc/hosts

Run these commands for functioning example:

$ unset COMPREPLY 
$ _known_hosts_real -p 'http//' -- "gdn"
$ echo $COMPREPLY 
http//gdns.google

Non-working example:

$ unset COMPREPLY 
$ _known_hosts_real -p 'http://' -- "gdn"
$ echo $COMPREPLY 
//gdns.google

Note the only difference is the added colon in "http://". The problem here is the prefix has lost the protocol specifier and the colon. Is this expected behavior?

Alex Stragies
  • 6,016

2 Answers2

1

It is expected behaviour, as _known_hosts_real calls __ltrim_colon_completions, which removes prefixes terminated by colons. _known_hosts_real is intended for use with the ssh known hosts file, so you should probably define your own function on the basis of compgen -A hostname.

Michael Vehrs
  • 2,208
  • thanks for tracing that. In fact, I want the known ssh hosts to be included. So instead of writing something entirely new with basically the same function, I decided to add a patch to _known_hosts_real to my .bashrc, which adds options "-S" (suffix), and "-t" (dont trim). – Alex Stragies Jul 07 '16 at 17:15
1

@Michael_Veers pointed out, that this is expected behavior (+1), so I should write my own function.

But instead I wrote a patch for the standard _known_hosts_real into my bashrc, that enables additional options:

  • -t Do not trim to left colon
  • -S <suffix> Add custom suffix

In .bashrc:

 . <(type _known_hosts_real | sed -e '
 1d;s/acF:p:/actS:F:p:/;
 s/^.*c)/\nS)\nsuffix=$OPTARG\n;;\nt)\nnotrim=1\n;;\nc)/;
 s/\(__lt\)/[ $notrim ]||\1/')

Now this works as expected:

$ unset COMPREPLY
$ _known_hosts_real -p "scp://" -S '/' -t -a gdn
$ echo $COMPREPLY
scp://gdns.google/
Alex Stragies
  • 6,016