Shell script input and name completion?

[vwgtiturbo]

I know I am probably turning into a pain, but... I was wondering... If I have a shell script, and it asks for the user's input, is it possible to somehow use name completion (like you would in a terminal), or does the user just have to enter every character?

[Outlaw]

I don't think there's any shell builtin for that, but that would be a cool feature to implement. Challenging I bet.

Check these out

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/317

http://caliban.org/bash/

Maybe somehow adapt that to reading user input

[vwgtiturbo]

I'll take a look at these links, and see what can be done. It isn't really a neccessity, but boy, it sure would be handy...

[redhead]

Just as a thought on this, couldn't something like this work:

#!/bin/sh
echo -n "Select a person (ann, anna, able, anton) : "
read CHOICE
case "$CHOICE" in
    ann*)
        echo "Person starting with \"ann\" chosen"
        echo -n "Which do you mean (ann or anna)? : ann"
        CHOICE = "ann"
        read SEC_CHOICE
        echo "The selected persons name is: $CHOICE$SEC_CHOICE"
        ;;
    ant*)
        echo "Person starting with \"ant\" chosen"
        ;;
    ab*)
        echo "Person starting with \"ab\" chosen"
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Unknown person: \"$CHOICE\""
        ;;
esac

I know it won't provide autocorrection or interactiveness, but it will provide a pseudo way of guessing what the user is selecting.

[vwgtiturbo]

I am not a CLI guru, but it looks like it could work... The project I was working on basically asked for the path of a file that you wish to alter. So, instead of having to type the entire path (i.e. /home/ron/documents/linux/advanced.bash.scripting.guide.htm, for example) I was trying to find a way to keep it shorter, yet accomodate any directory structure a user would have. I haven't really looked into to this too much since the last replies, as school is kicking my rump. Sometimes, I just think I am too old and set in my ways to go back to school...

[redhead]

Hmm.. making it fit any possible directory structure, dosn't sound feasible to me, since it would have to let the case portion automaticaly adjust to what is propossed, so it would programming wise be like saying

P: Program, U: User
P: What file to run ?
U: /us<enter>
P: We have /usr with underlying directories "bin", "doc", "games", "include", "src", "lib", ...
P: Which one ? /usr/
U: ga<enter>
P: In /usr/games we have the following executable files, "tuxracer", "msfith", which do you chose?
P: /usr/games/
U: tu<enter>
P: Running /usr/games/tuxracer

This is from a scripting point of view extreemly improbable, it would require some way of reading a directory structure, and do a paternmatching on the given name..

Ex. in C you would use opendir(3), readdir(3), scandir(3), seekdir(3) and closedir(3), but for a shell script I havn't encountered anything which does the same.

[vwgtiturbo]

Oh well, it was more of a "Man, that would be nice" versus a "gotta have it". No big deal. Maybe one day, if I get into programming, I will remember this day, and find a way to do it (don't hold your breath though...).