How to get the result from bash auto-completion as a string?

Question

What I'm looking for is not how to add autcompletion in bash for another program, but a way to get the result of what would have happened in bash to a string, basically:

autocomplete "/etc/apa"

would return

/etc/apache2/

so I can use that in my script.

Any help is greatly appreciated, for all I can find is how to use the "complete" bash function, which does something different ;)

Cheers, rafael

Answer 1

Bash has a built-in command compgen which can help you a lot. For example, if you want to know which dirs would be auto-completed when you type cd /etc/s<TAB>:

$ compgen -d /etc/s
/etc/security
/etc/sgml
/etc/skel
/etc/ssh
/etc/ssl
/etc/subversion
/etc/sudoers.d
/etc/sysctl.d
$

Then, the following command would tell you which dir you'll go into by cd /etc/se<TAB>:

$ compgen -d /etc/se
/etc/security
$

compgen can take most options of the complete command. See bash's manual for more details.