bash-completion@2 for Mac

bash-completion

Introduction

bash-completion is a collection of

recipes for a number of commands for the completion system of the Bash shell. These recipes enhance Bash's typical plain completion of filenames to provide better suggestions of options and arguments for many commands. Also provided is a collection of helper functions to assist in creating new recipes, and a set of facilities for loading recipes automatically on demand, as well as installing them.

Installation

The easiest way to install this software is to use a package; refer to Repology for a comprehensive list of operating system distributions, package names, and available versions.

Depending on the package, you may still need to source it from either /etc/bashrc or ~/.bashrc (or any other file sourcing those). If you have _only_ bash >= 4.2 installed, you can do this by using:

If you have older bash versions in use, their loading of bash_completion should be prevented. See further for more info.

If you don't have the package readily available for your distribution, or you simply don't want to use one, you can install bash-completion using the standard commands for GNU autotools packages:

These commands install the completions and helpers, as well as a profile.d script that loads bash_completion where appropriate.

If your system does not use the profile.d directory (usually below /etc) mechanism (i.e., does not automatically source shell scripts in it), you can source the $sysconfdir/profile.d/bash_completion.sh script in /etc/bashrc or ~/.bashrc.

The profile.d script provides a configuration file hook that can be used to prevent loading bash_completion on a per user basis when it's installed system wide. To do this: Turn off programmable completion with shopt -u progcomp in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bash_completion (or ~/.config/bash_completion if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set) Turn it back on (for example in ~/.bashrc) if you want to use programmable completion for other purposes.

macOS (OS X)

If you're using macOS (formerly OS X), /etc/bashrc is apparently not sourced at all, and ~/.bashrc is not sourced from ~/.bash_profile by default (because ~/.bash_profile is not created by default). In this case, the standard way is to configure ~/.bash_profile to source ~/.bashrc and write interactive settings in ~/.bashrc. You can source ~/.bashrc in ~/.bash_profile in the following way:

Then, you can source bash-completion in your ~/.bashrc. It should be noted that bash-completion should not be sourced in ~/.bash_profile because ~/.bash_profile is only loaded in interactive _login_ shell sessions. If you start nested Bash sessions, the interactive settings in ~/.bash_profile will disappear. It is strongly recommended to source ~/.bashrc from ~/.bash_profile and write interactive settings in ~/.bashrc.