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I would like to get auto-completion on my python scripts also in the arguments.
I had never really understood how the bash_completion worked (for arguments), but after I digged in I understood that:
The second point in particular is not great, because I would like to have it automatically generated.
The best thing would be that the shell asks to my program at every TAB about what to complete, but I have the impression that this can't really work, is that correct?
The second option is probably just to write a converter from an argparse parser to a shell function which completes correctly.
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This tutorial is intended to be a gentle introduction to argparse, the recommended command-line parsing module in the Python standard library. There are two other modules that fulfill the same task, namely getopt (an equivalent for getopt () from the C language) and the deprecated optparse .
Argcomplete provides easy, extensible command line tab completion of arguments for your Python script. It makes two assumptions:
you should put that line in your ~/.bashrc or follow argcomplete's docs and activate 'global' completion. After that you completion works as requested. The way this works is that the eval line creates a function _python_argcomlete which is registered using complete.
The python-argcomplete-tcsh script provides completions for tcsh. The following is an example of the tcsh completion syntax for my-awesome-script emitted by register-python-argcomplete: or create new completion file, e.g:
Shameless self-promotion: https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete
argcomplete provides bash completion for argparse.
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Bash "completion" really is great. And easy for programs written in Python....
I think this is just what you want: optcomplete: Shell Completion Self-Generator for Python. It is available, e.g., as the "python-optcomplete" package in Ubuntu.
You insert a few lines in your python program, and the user (one time) runs the bash "complete" program to tell bash how to complete the arguments:
complete -F _optcomplete <program>
and now the user has completion! By default it gives simple completion on program options. See the example for how to customize how completion works for a particular option. It is beautifully written, and easy to extend to handle sub-commands, alternate completion options, etc.!
Update:
For completion in zsh (for both optparse and argparse) see genzshcomp 0.3.1 : Python Package Index
As noted by @englebip, we still need something similar for the new argparse module, introduced in Python 2.7 and 3.2, since optparse is now deprecated.
Here is the discussion on moving in that direction:
See also this background on how it is done: How does argparse (and the deprecated optparse) respond to 'tab' keypress after python program name, in bash? - Stack Overflow
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