Re: Weird interaction of xargs with complete ( shell builtin )

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello,

On 10/27/2016 07:01 AM, Abhijith Sethuraj wrote:
> cat file1 | xargs -I %% complete -A alias %%
> xargs: complete: No such file or directory

As you,ve said, "complete" is a shell built-in (and even specific to bash).
xargs tries to run a program/script called 'complete' and fails.

To run a built-in shell command use:

    cat file1 | xargs -I% bash -c "complete -A alias %"

However that above will not do any good because
the changes made by 'complete' will only take hold in each invoked bash,
and will be promptly discarded.

If you want 'complete' to affect on your current shell session,
try:

    eval $(cat file1 | xargs -I% echo complete -A alias %)
or
    eval $(sed 's/^/complete -A alias /' file1)


regards,
 -assaf