custom directory completion appends whitespace

Question

I have the following directory structure:

/home/tichy/xxx/yyy/aaa
/home/tichy/xxx/yyy/aab
/home/tichy/xxx/yyy/aac

I would like to enter cdw y<TAB> and get cdw yyy/<CURSOR> as a result, so I could add cdw yyy/a<TAB> and get cdw yyy/aa<CURSOR>

The solution I came up with gives me the following:
cdw y<TAB> => cdw yyy<SPACE><CURSOR>

Following code I have so far:

_cdw () {
    local cur prev dirs
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
    prev="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}"
    COMPREPLY=($(compgen -d -- /home/tichy/xxx/${cur}|perl -pe 's{^/home/tichy/xxx/}{}'))
    # no difference, a bit more logical:
    dirs=$(compgen -o nospace -d /home/tichy/xxx/${cur}|perl -pe 's/{^/home/tichy/xxx/}{}')
    COMPREPLY=($(compgen -d -W ${dir} ${cur}|perl -pe 's{^/home/tichy/xxx/}{}'))
    return 0
}
complete -F _cdw cdw
cdw () {
    cd /home/tichy/xxx/$@
}

Any ideas what's wrong? It seems to me that the completion process seems to be finished and isn't expecting any more input.

Answer 1

The simplest solution I've found so far is to generate completions that look like this:

COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "file1 file2 file3 dir1/ dir2/ dir3/" ) )

and add this line just before returning

[[ $COMPREPLY == */ ]] && compopt -o nospace

This sets the nospace option whenever the completion may fill in until the slash so that the user ends up with:

cmd dir1/<cursorhere>

instead of:

cmd dir1/ <cursorhere>

and it doesn't set the nospace option whenever the completion may fill in until a full filename so that the user ends up with:

cmd file1 <cursorhere>

instead of:

cmd file1<cursorhere>