Hello,
Thank you for your useful script. I have an issue as the below:

alias apti="apt install"
alias pkgi="apt update && apt install"

λ [~] $ apti
Display all 1507 possibilities? (y or n)
λ [~] $ pkgi

apti <tab>: showing the possible packages for installation

pkgi <tab>: nothing shows

Is it possible to support this case?

Snaps use already some wrapper script (https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/blob/master/data/completion/bash/complete.sh) - that doesn't work together with complete-alias.

Any way to get auto-completion work for aliases for snap-package-commands?

First of all, thank you so much for your work. This is a very helpful tool you've created.

I have a bunch of aliases where I prepend it with a variable. Like the below:

alias researchut_dch='DEBEMAIL="[email protected]" DEBFULLNAME="Ritesh Raj Sarraf" dch --force-distribution -Dresearchut '

The bash auto-completion for such aliases does not work. Is it something that is a bug or a limitation ?

There are commands that have different completion depending on an environment variable.

E.g. kubeconfig (and oc) will return the pods (in the configured namespace) of the cluster defined in KUBECONFIG.

so

export KUBECONFIG=/path/to/a/kube/config
kubeconfig get po [TAB]

will return the pods in the cluster (and namespace) configured in KUBECONFIG.

Now an alias like alias k-test="KUBECONFIG=/path/to/kube/config kubecfg" with _complete_alias will complete using kubecfg without the KUBECONFIG environment.

Is it possible to somehow set the environment for this specific completion?

On macOS, I was getting this error. I had bash-completion version 1.3.3 installed with homebrew. Uninstalling the old version and reinstalling v2 with brew install bash-completion@2 fixed the issue.

I'll supply a doc patch to mention this fix.

if I define the following aliases :

alias ldocker='docker run -it -v /etc/group:/etc/group:ro -v /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro -u $(id -u $USER):$(id -g $USER)'
alias marcel='docker run -it -v /etc/group:/etc/group:ro -v /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro -u 1000:1000'

the marcel alias autocomplete works flawlessly 👍 for both flags and for arguments (specifically in this case I can autocomplete docker image names)

However in the case of the ldocker alias only flag autocomplete seems to work (both the flag names and the possible arguments for the flags)
normal arguments (as image names) do not autocomplete

changing the $() to a ` syntax doesn't solve the problem, so it probably has to do evaluating in the alias definition?
Is this forbidden somehow?

Hello.
Thank you for the script.

But i encountered 1 problem. Autocomplete does not work if alias has certain parameters, e.g

# works
alias ggrep='grep -riP'

# does not work
alias ggrep='grep --exclude-dir=.git'

It looks like this repo has no github release.

I suggest to follow the steps on
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/releasing-projects-on-github/managing-releases-in-a-repository#creating-a-release

The created release should show up at
https://github.com/cykerway/complete-alias/releases

The latest release will be accessible at
https://github.com/cykerway/complete-alias/releases/latest

For comparison here are two github repos that do have releases:
https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver
https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts

I have

alias p:='declare -p'
complete -F _complete_alias p:

yet TAB won't complete variable names. p., p? work. complete -v p: also works. Not sure if due to complete_alias or bash-completion.

The instructions are confusing or I'm too dumb to figure them out or this doesn't work on Debian bullseye anymore running bash 5.1.4. I installed this with apt get bash-completion

I have an alias for docker called "dk".

I created file in home directory called complate_alias with following:

complete -F _complete_alias dk

In a newly created file called .bash_completion in my home dir, I have . /home/admin/complete_alias. I also put the same in ~/.bashrc.

I logged out and back into the shell. Resource all the files above. Still get:

dk <tab>-bash: completion: function _complete_alias' not found`

Hi,

On Ubuntu 21.04 with apt install bash-completion,

When invoking my alias I'm getting

_completion_loader: command not found
_command_offset: command not found

afaik, these utils should be provided as part of bash-completion. What am I doing wrong? Thanks.

Hi,

This is a follow-up to #40. I'm opening a new issue because the older one has been closed and i've been able to come up with a reproducer.

How to reproduce

Build the following docker file docker build -t compal:gh46 .

# syntax=docker/dockerfile:1.4
FROM debian:bookworm-slim

RUN <<EOS
  set -ex
  apt update && apt install -y --no-install-recommends \
    bash-completion \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    git
  adduser test
EOS

USER test
WORKDIR /home/test

RUN bash <<'EOS'
  set -ex
  git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/cykerway/complete-alias.git compal
  git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git .fzf
  ./.fzf/install
EOS

COPY <<'EOF' ./.bash_aliases
alias ls="ls --color=auto"
EOF

COPY <<'EOF' ./.bash_completion
source ~/compal/complete_alias
complete -F _complete_alias "${!BASH_ALIASES[@]}"
EOF

Run a bash session in a container:

docker run -it --rm compal:gh46 bash

On the bash prompt, type ls -<TAB>.

The shell enters an infinite loop, reapetedly outputing error: cannot unmask alias command: ls.
Type <Ctrl-C> until you can go back to the prompt and exit.

How to fix

Running docker run -it --rm compal:gh46 tail .bashrc outputs:

if ! shopt -oq posix; then
  if [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
    . /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion
  elif [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . /etc/bash_completion
  fi
fi

[ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash

We can see that the fzf installation script has blindly appended it's source command. The result is that the fzf completion script is sourced after ~./bash_completion (since the latter is itself sourced at the end of /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion).

If we instead use the following dockerfile:

# syntax=docker/dockerfile:1.4
FROM debian:bookworm-slim

RUN <<EOS
  set -ex
  apt update && apt install -y --no-install-recommends \
    bash-completion \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    git
  adduser test
EOS

USER test
WORKDIR /home/test

RUN bash <<'EOS'
  set -ex
  git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/cykerway/complete-alias.git compal
  git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git .fzf
  ./.fzf/install --no-update-rc
EOS

COPY <<'EOF' ./.bash_aliases
alias ls="ls --color=auto"
EOF

COPY <<'EOF' ./.bash_completion
source ~/.fzf.bash
source ~/compal/complete_alias
complete -F _complete_alias "${!BASH_ALIASES[@]}"
EOF

Then typing ls -<TAB><TAB><TAB> correctly shows the ls option completions, but typing ls /etc/**<TAB> does not show the fzf path completions.

If we now export COMPAL_AUTO_UNMASK=1 at the top of ~/.bash_completion, then typing ls -<TAB><TAB><TAB> correctly shows the ls option completions, and typing ls /etc/**<TAB> correctly shows the fzf path completions.

Final notes

I do not have the knowledge required to find tha actual cause of the issue, nor to tell if it's a bug in complete-alias, fzf, bash itself or just a fundamental limitation of the bash completion system...

However I think that this might warrant an entry in the docs stating that care should be taken that, in presence of other completion handlers, complete_alias should be sourced last, and that the COMPAL_AUTO_UNMASK setting may resolve some conflicts.

Line 777: This pattern never matches because of a previous pattern on line 761.

command is already checked for in line 761, so line 777 will never be called.

__compal__unmask_alias_manual() {
  local cmd="$1"
  
  case "$cmd" in
    ...
    ...
    ...    👇
    761: command | type | which )
             complete -c "$cmd"
             ;;
    ...
    ...           👇
    777: aoss | command | do | else ... )
             complete -F _command "$cmd"
             ;;
    ...)
  esac
}

https://github.com/cykerway/complete-alias/blob/7f2555c2fe7a1f248ed2d4301e46c8eebcbbc4e2/complete_alias#L777C14-L777C21

I generally dislike checking GitHub for updates of software I use. This is just a single file, but never the less, it's exceptionally useful and I'd like my package manager to handle keeping it up to date with any future changes. :)

To that end, I used the OpenSUSE Open Build Service to set up a project hosting the build of packages, and assembled a spec file for generating RPMs on SUSE and RedHat/Fedora. If there's interest, I'll also do the Debian/Ubuntu packaging at the same place (I make more RPMs recently, so that's where I started). I have it set up for my fork to automatically trigger builds upon creation of a new tag, but I'd be more than happy to shift maintainership over to this project so I can kill the automation which syncs my fork. It's just a matter of adding a webhook to the GitHub project with a token (I'll share mine if no one here wants to create an openbuild account) and continuing to use tags for new releases; I've done the rest of the work to automatically build packages and generate the changelog (PR coming). If that's not something of interest, that's ok - I'll just keep mirroring the project to my own fork. :)

The resulting packages (and OS-appropriate repositories) are available at https://software.opensuse.org/package/bash-complete-alias.

I happen to stumble upon https://repo.cykerway.com/complete-alias, on that page there is no link to where you can download complete-alias.

I'm trying to get complete-alias to work with the following alias (which lets me use the extended features of Git's git diff command on non-versioned files, outside of any repository):

alias gitdiff="GIT_DIR= git diff"

As completion setup, I use:

complete -F _complete_alias gitdiff

When I try the alias as follows, I don't get any completions:

$ gitdiff --<TAB>

I have setup Git completions, and the following gets me completions of its long options as expected:

$ GIT_DIR= git diff --<TAB>

At:
https://github.com/cykerway/complete-alias/blob/master/completions/bash_completion.sh#L26
you reset a bunch of aliases.

I've read the comment, but can't really get what you're trying to do. What's an example of this being needed?

How do you know that those aliases haven't been changed by the user, and resetting them will not cause unexpected behaviour?

I did all you said in a ubuntu 16.0 but when I type an alias and hit tab simply nothing happens, except for showing all available command which I had before this too.

This is borked due to differences in sed on macOS. GNU sed uses sed -r, but macOS (BSD) uses sed -e.

matthew@newt:~
$ kubectl get
certificatesigningrequest  endpoints                  persistentvolume           rolebinding
clusterrolebinding         event                      persistentvolumeclaim      secret
componentstatus            horizontalpodautoscaler    pod                        service
configmap                  ingress                    poddisruptionbudget        serviceaccount
controllerrevision         job                        podsecuritypolicy          statefulset
cronjob                    namespace                  podtemplate                status
daemonset                  networkpolicy              replicaset                 storageclass
deployment                 node                       replicationcontroller
matthew@newt:~
$ kubectl get ^C
matthew@newt:~
$ k get sed: illegal option -- r
usage: sed script [-Ealn] [-i extension] [file ...]
       sed [-Ealn] [-i extension] [-e script] ... [-f script_file] ... [file ...]
^C
matthew@newt:~

I have an alias that runs a docker container and mounts my work directory inside the container:

alias dkrun='docker run -it --rm --volume $HOME/workdir:$HOME/workdir --workdir $HOME/workdir'

When I type dkrun<TAB><TAB> it should show a list of available images on my system, but complete-alias doesn't seem to like the --volume option because of the colon. If I remove the --volume option from the alias (or even just the colon), then the completion works as expected, and it displays the list of images.

hardware: MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) with Apple M1 Pro
OS: macOS Monterey version 12.4
GNU bash: version 5.1.16(1)-release (aarch64-apple-darwin21.1.0)
bash-completion v2 installed using homebrew

I thought that maybe the Apple M1 Pro might be causing the issue, so I also tested the scenario inside a linux/amd64 container:

docker run -it --rm --platform linux/amd64 --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock ubuntu:focal

Inside the container, I installed bash-completion, docker.io, and complete-alias. Then I created the dkrun alias as before and sourced .bash_completion, but the completion still doesn't work when the alias contains a colon.

Incidentally, while the completion does not display the list of available images as expected, if I type dkrun --<TAB><TAB> then it does complete the list of long options available to the docker run command.

I used to have a MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) with Intel Core i7 and macOS Monterey, and completion worked fine.

Thanks for this useful tool. I am on windows, and it works described on wsl-1 and wsl-2 on windows, but cannot get it to work for git-bash on windows, using the same instructions.

Any suggestions ?

Hi there,

to enable aliases auto-unmasking, the Readme just says:

set COMPAL_AUTO_UNMASK to 1

but the last line of the script also says:

to complete all aliases, run this line after all aliases have been defined;
#complete -F _complete_alias "${!BASH_ALIASES[@]}"

Which way is the right one?

(Thanks for this awesome tool BTW, it works perfectly fine with Debian 11 and ~ 140 aliases)

First of all, thank you for sharing this, I have used it for a while and it has been really helpful!

I noticed this issue recently; I wasn't able to figure out what was causing it by looking at the code, and I was wondering if you knew of a fix. Here is how to reproduce:

First, ssh into a remote machine (mine is on AWS).

Then create an alias for a command that blocks. My use case is kubectl logs -f, but tail -f will exhibit the same issue.

Then tab-complete the alias, press enter to run the command, and then CTRL+C to kill the streaming tail command.

Afterwards, the terminal does not show what I type, although it does go through (e.g. if I type ls and enter, it will list my directory). Running reset restores the shell properly.

Have you seen this behavior, and do you know of a potential fix? I found these posts which may or may not be helpful:

• Shell does not show typed in commands, “reset” works, but what happened?
• Fix terminal after displaying a binary file
• Linux Terminal: typing feedback gone, line breaks not displayed
  

Thank you!

when i run source ~/.zshrc
I get the following error when integrate complete-alias to zsh

__compal__main:1: bad math expression: illegal character: "

this my .zshrc script

# Path to your oh-my-zsh installation.
export ZSH="$HOME/.oh-my-zsh"

ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"

plugins=(git)

source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh

# Path
export PATH="$PATH:/home/laptop/.config/composer/vendor/bin"

# Completion Alias
source ~/.bash_completion.d/complete_alias

# Aliases
alias zshconfig="mousepad ~/.zshrc"
alias ohmyzsh="mousepad ~/.oh-my-zsh"
alias c="clear"
alias l="ls -all"

# Systemctl Aliases
alias sstart="sudo systemclt start"
alias sstop="sudo systemclt stop"
alias srestart="sudo systemclt restart"
alias senable="sudo systemclt enable"
alias sdisable="sudo systemclt disable"

complete -F _complete_alias "${!BASH_ALIASES[@]}"

You may need this information
OS : Manjaro with XFCE

I use certain utility packages to manage multiple versions of a given utility. One such is tfenv to manage Terraform. This sets up my PATH such that the executable file named terraform is symlinked to a script that invokes the appropriate actual instance. Command completion works without issue. I would like to set up an alias, e.g.:
alias tfinit='terraform init ... $@'
but I find that this gives me errors like:
-bash: compgen: warning: -C option may not work as you expect

Is this possible? What can I do to help complete-alias DWIM?

Thanks,
Matt

Info:

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.4.20(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)
# VS Code is installed and 'code' is a command to run it

Problem:

$ mkdir foo
$ cd foo
$ touch bar
$ code [tab] # transforms to "code bar "
$ alias code='code --goto'
$ complete -F _complete_alias code
$ source ~/.bash_completion.d/complete_alias
$ code [tab] # transforms to "code bar", no space at the end

I did not met any problems with any other aliased comands
(including vi, subl, etc that also have file[:line[:column]] or file[ +line] syntax).
So I think it is more VS Code's problem rather than this script's one.
Still if it may be somehow solved, it would be beautiful.

When pressing tab to complete an alias, bash throws an error:

bash: completion: function `_complete_alias' not found

Just an idea that you may want to add to the README or something. (Or not.)

Since I have a couple dozen aliases, I recently replaced all the

complete -F _complete_alias foo
complete -F _complete_alias bar
complete -F _complete_alias baz
...

with this in my .bashrc:

for a in ${!BASH_ALIASES[*]}; do
    complete -F _complete_alias $a
done

So far everything has been working like a charm.

And big thanks for this awesome script! It's a life saver.

The README file is just very hard to understand, and please use capital letters when you can.

hi guys,

i can't seem to get this working on windows, have tried to follow instructions in the readme and especially the FAQ section about windows but finding it pretty confusing.

I've got both files bash_completion.sh and complete_alias.sh in the .bash_completion.d directory, and i'm sourcing them in the specified order in my bash_profile file for git bash:
source ~/.bash_completion.d/bash_completion.sh
source ~/.bash_completion.d/complete_alias.sh

I've also added this to the end of my bash profile, as well as trying to specify the aliases by name:
complete -F _complete_alias "${!BASH_ALIASES[@]}"

Not super clear on what i should be editing or adding to the two repo .sh files above, i tried a few things from the readme adding to both files but nothing seemed to work.

Any help much appreciated

Hey there.

Thanks for your nice tool.
It's really something that should be available out-of-the box on every system.

For that reason, would you consider to merge it into bash-completion?
That would have the advantage, that it gets more widespread on readily available (sooner or later) in basically every distribution.

The bash-completion maintainer seemed to be open for such an idea, if you'd continue with the maintenance of the tool there.

Cheers,
Chris.

Hi @cykerway,

I packaged and maintained the complete-alias AUR package for easy installation and update on Arch LInux.
As
I would highly appreciate that git tags would not be rewritten and break checksumming of the fetched tarball. Please tag a new release instead. It can be a patch release (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH).

How to handle aliases with parameters (e.g. git add -A)?

Thank you

this package is fantastic, and very easy to set up! thanks for writing it! 🎉

Hi,

I face a bug when using complete-alias with aliases such as alias mv='mv -i'

How to reproduce this bug

Install

• install bash-completion: sudo apt install bash-completion
• download complete_alias from Github
• paste in ~/.bashrc.d/completion-aliases.bashrc
• source from .bashrc
• enable auto unmask with modifications of the lines COMPAL_AUTO_UNMASK=1 and complete -F _complete_alias "${!BASH_ALIASES[@]}"

At this point everything works fine, auto unmasking works great.

The bug

The bug appears when writing mv then hitting Tab:

error: cannot unmask alias command: mv
error: cannot unmask alias command: mv
error: cannot unmask alias command: mv
error: cannot unmask alias command: mv
error: cannot unmask alias command: mv
error: cannot unmask alias command: mv

Note that the same issue happens with alias rm='rm -i' and alias cp='cp -i'

Any hint?

Config

• Debian 11
• GNU bash, version 5.1.4(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

Wonderful project. Some comments on documentation:

• it's not clear from the README whether this works for multi-word aliases (such as alias apti='apt install'). In fact, it does, which is very nice, and should perhaps be mentioned in the description / examples
• the README suggests "appending" complete_alias to ~/.bash_completion (presumably, after everything that's already in there). And then adding some more completions (separated from the initial ones by the complete_alias code blob). Perhaps it makes more sense to insert complete_alias at the top of the file, or, better yet, source it from the cloned git repo, as the user may want to get updates

Also, there is a way to install complete_alias for all visible aliases which might also be interesting for users:

complete -F _complete_alias $(alias | perl -lwne 'print $1 if /^alias ([^=]+)=/')

Before adding this my bashrc took roughly 200ms to load. With this enabled for 6 aliases it takes roughly 600ms which is a bit much for my liking. Do you think this could be improved?

Hi

After install, i got this message when i attempt to auto_complete a command when i press "tab".
-bash: compgen: warning: -C option may not work as you expect

I'm using ubuntu
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Release: 18.04
Codename: bionic