Tab Completion for autopkg

Tony Williams aka ‘honestpuck’ has built a script to enable tab-completion for autopkg in bash.

This means that you can type

$ autopkg s⇥

(where ⇥ is the tab key) and it will autocomplete to

$ autopkg search 

This will also work for recipe names:

$ autopkg run BBEdit⇥⇥
BBEdit.download  BBEdit.jss       BBEdit.pkg       
BBEdit.install   BBEdit.munki     

This is really useful. Auto-completion not only saves on typing, but helps to avoid errors.

Installing autocompletion in your profile

Tony has provided instructions on how to install the script with brew. However, it not hard to install this manually in your .bash_profile or .bashrc. First, clone the github repository on to your system (I keep all projects like this in an un-creatively named ‘Projects’ folder):

$ cd ~/Projects
$ git clone https://github.com/Honestpuck/autopkg_complete.git

This will download the project to autopkg_create. The file we need is the autopkg file inside that folder.

Then add the following lines to your .bash_profile or .bashrc:

if [[ -r "$HOME/Projects/autopkg_complete/autopkg" ]]; then
    source "$HOME/Projects/autopkg_complete/autopkg"
fi

You will need to adjust the path if you are using a different location. Basically these lines say: if this file exists and is readable, then read and interpret it as bash source. Since you need to define functions in the context of the shell, you need to `source` the file, rather execute it as script. (When you run the the file as a script, the functions will be defined in the context of the script, and then ‘forgotten’ when the script ends.)

Save your new profile and open a new Terminal window or type

$ source ~/.bash_profile

to update an existing shell.

Thanks again to Tony Williams, this is very useful!