2 min read

ZSH scripts with dynamic command completion

August 26, 2021

ZSH/Bash completion guides sure are confusing. I personally had difficulties wrapping my head around those arbitrary compdef, _describe, _arguments, compadd commands. Moreover, in my case I wanted to complete a script that is placed in multiple folders and should load completion arguments dynamically. Luckily I found a simple solution.

We assume that zsh and oh-my-zsh are configured.

For every project I create task script and a task.md file that contains a list of available commands, their options and descriptions.

Running task help gives the content of task.md. So each task script has various subcommands that perform different tasks.

Here is an example for such a task file.

/**/task

#!/bin/bash

set -eo pipefail

# load env vars
if [ -f .env ]
then
  export $(cat .env | sed 's/#.*//g' | xargs)
fi

function help() {
echo
echo "$1 <command> [options]"
echo
echo "commands:"
echo
column -t -s"|" ./task.md | tail -n +3
echo
}

case "$1" in
    install-docker)
        sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common
        curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg \
        | sudo apt-key add - \
        && sudo apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88
        sudo add-apt-repository \
        "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
        $(lsb_release -cs) \
        stable"
        sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
        sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
        ;;
    install-tools)
        cd ~
        # Install node version manager
        [ ! -d 'n' ] && curl -L https://git.io/n-install | 
        # Install python version manager
        [ ! -d '.pyenv' ] && git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv.git ~/.pyenv
        # Install tmux plugins
        [ ! -d '.tmux' ] && git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm
        # Install binaries
        sudo apt install -y zsh vim tmux jq pass htop xclip ripgrep
        ;;
    *)
        help task
        exit 1
esac

And here is its help file.

/**/task.md

| command        | option | description     |
| -------------- | ------ | --------------- |
| install-docker |        | Install docker. |
| install-tools  |        | Install tools.  |

The autocompletion should list the available commands on task <TAB>. This is done by adding an completion file:

~/.oh-my-zsh/completions/_task

#compdef task

_arguments '1: :->tasks' '*: :_files'
case "$state" in
    tasks)
        args=$(awk -F"|" '{print $2}' ./task.md | tail -n +3 | xargs)
        args="$args help"
        _arguments "1:profiles:($args)"
        ;;
esac

Whenever the tabulator is hit after entering task the completion script will lookup command in the help file and output them as arguments.

➜  dotfiles git:(master) task <TAB>
install-docker            install-tools

Easy, isn’t it? If the command is completed it will list files.

➜  dotfiles git:(master) ✗ task install-tools <TAB>
default.vim             oh-my-zsh-completions/

Categories: Blog
Tags: zsh , bash , completion , dynamic
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