[OFFTOPIC] automatic option completion (was Re: PROPOSAL: Automatic wrapping of CLIs with GUIs)

[Olivier Aubert <aubert antares enst-bretagne fr>]

Dirk Herrmann <dirk@ida.ing.tu-bs.de> writes:

> Maybe more useful would be a solution similar to the 'complete' command of
> the tcsh (don't know about bash): with 'complete' you specify how the
      and zsh (don't want to start a shell-flame-war yet).
> shell should expand the command line if you type TAB at any position.
[...]
> 1) The command line tools communicate with the shell. If the user types
>    TAB, the tool gets the current command line, parses it and reports the
>    possible completions to the shell, potentially including some helping
>    texts.

Well, if you want it, you can fetch something that vaguely seems like
it at
  http://www-info.enst-bretagne.fr/~aubert/guessopt.tar.gz

It is an old program I did during a boring rainy afternoon, and is not
very well written. Don't expect too much, but it can help to complete
long option names.

> From the manpage:

guessopt - extracts option name from help texts
 
guessopt reads data from its standard input (usually from a pipe) and tries
to extract option names from it in order to get automatic completion (with
zsh in particular).

Have fun.

Olivier