Autocompletion is one of the most important features of a command shell. It accelerates your typing and improves the overall user experience. For bash, autocompletion is mostly provided by the awesome bash-completion project. This project not only provides completion scripts for the most common commands, it also defines useful helper functions that are generally useful for writing autocompletion scripts.

That being said, I was missing certain helper functions that I tend to use in my own completion scripts. These additional helper functions were already requested on the bash-completion project and will hopefully be implemented. Until this happens, the corresponding functions are stored inside this repository.

On startup, bash automatically sources the file ~/.bash_completion from your home directory. This is a good place to store autocompletion related code and the helper functions from this project should be stored in this file too. If the file does not already exist you can just copy the version from this repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/qtc-de/completion-helpers
$ cp completion-helpers/bash_completion ~/.bash_completion

Apart from some helper functions, the bash_completion file from this repository also contains the following code:

for bcfile in ~/.bash_completion.d/* ; do
  [ -f "$bcfile" ] && . $bcfile
done

This code snipped sources all files contained inside the folder ~/.bash_completion.d and allows you to store completion scripts for different commands in separate files. This solution is more organized than putting all command specific completion code inside your ~/.bash_completion file.