Re: Completion with -W fails if words contain ':'

[Martin D Kealey]

On Wed, 4 Dec 2024 at 14:48, Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 3, 2024 at 10:20 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> > An easier workaround might have been removing `:' from COMP_WORDBREAKS.
>
> Sure, but that would affect all completions. I only want to change how
> completions
> work for my one custom command.
>

Write a custom completion function that localizes COMP_WORDBREAKS without
colon, and invokes compgen with the desired args.

If you meant escaping colons on the command line with the "say" command,
> that's not useful
> to me (and I haven't been able to get it to work anyway).
>
> Can you clarify with an example? So far, I haven't found a solution
> that's easier than just changing the syntax of my command to use '/'
> rather than ':' (which I've done).
>

The point of this special behaviour for colons is to allow you to get
reasonable behaviour when you type

PATH=$PATH:~/bi<TAB>

Quoting the colon allows you to write:

cd ~/foo\:ba<TAB>

or

cd ~/'foo:ba'<TAB>

It looks like "-o filenames" is pretty close to what I want. I'd
> rather not have the backslashes appear when I type <TAB>, but I
> can live with that.
>

Yeah, I wrote a tab completion package for iproute2, and getting slashes
before the colons in IPv6 addresses makes them unreadable. It drove me nuts
initially.

And then I want to wrap that in the zcomp visual menu
<https://github.com/kurahaupo/zcomp>, which adds a whole 'nother layer of
pain.

-Martin