Accessing bash completions for specific commands programmatically

Quite an old question, but in the mean time I've implemented a script that handles this to reuse completions with ZSH


Check in the /etc/bash_completion.d/ directory. This is where the different command completion scripts stay.


I don't really know how it works, but the awesome window manager uses the following Lua code for getting access to bash completion's result:

https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/blob/master/lib/awful/completion.lua#L119

  1. Via complete -p we find complete -o bashdefault -o default -o nospace -F _git git. We remember "_git" for later.
  2. The length of "git l" is 5, so we set COMP_COUNT=6. We are completing the first argument to "git", so COMP_CWORD=1.

All together we use the following script:

__print_completions() {
    printf '%s\n' "${COMPREPLY[@]}"
}

# load bash-completion functions
source /etc/bash_completion

# load git's completion function
_completion_loader git

COMP_WORDS=(git l)
COMP_LINE='git l'
COMP_POINT=6
COMP_CWORD=1
_git
__print_completions

Output: "log"