Re: Custom word completion, word splitting, bad behavior

[Nick Patavalis]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

I'm not sure I understand everything, other than basically... "that's
how readline does it".

I don't suggest there's a bug in readline, but I don't understand, for
example, why

  foo --bar "baz" aa bb

is ok to be split like:

  foo | --bar | "baz" | aa | bb

while

  foo --bar="baz" aa bb

cannot be split like:

  foo | --bar | = | "baz" | aa | bb

What would be so terrible with this, that isn't with the previous
(with regard to being able to complete inside quotes, and such)

In any case, splitting it like:

  foo | --bar | =" | baz" aa bb

(the last part a single word) does not look reasonable to me (even if
it may be convenient in some occasions I cannot think of). It looks
like a mix-up between the roles of " as a quoting character and as a
word break character.

If I replace " with another word-break character (say :), the command
is again split in a reasonable manner:

  foo | --bar | =: | baz | : | aa | bb

Actually, " behaves like a word-break character only when it's a part
of a sequence of other word-break characters (from what I can
tell). As, for example, in:

  foo bar"baz
  foo | bar"baz    (and not: foo | bar | " | baz)

Anyway... confusing as it may be, it is as it is.

I guess my question is: how would you suggest I handle completion for
a command, when an option is given like --bar="baz"? After this point,
my completion function stops getting split-up words and effectively
keeps getting a prev being '="' and and a cur being the rest of the
line. The only solution I can think of is to parse / break-up the line
myself... If this is how it's usualy done, then ok

Again, thanks for your answer.

/npat

P.S. It seems that I'm not the only one being bitten by this... I
tried the bash-completion package (ships with many modern Linux
distributions) and, if I'm not mistaken, even for
simple commands like "ls", completion stops working when an option
value is specified with =, and within quotes. Like:

   ls --block-size="150K" /[tab]  (no completion)

without the quotes, or without the equal, it works fine.