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I am looking to get tab-completion on my command line aliases, for example, say I defined the following alias :

alias apt-inst='sudo aptitude install'

Is there a way to get the completions provided by aptitude when I hit the tab key? i.e. when I write 'sudo aptitude install gnumer' and hit tab, aptitude completes this to gnumeric, or if there was uncertainty lists all the available packages starting with gnumer. If I do it using my alias, nothing - no completion.

There is a great thread about this on the Ubuntu forums. Ole J proposes the following alias completion definition function:

function make-completion-wrapper () 
 local function_name="$2"
 local arg_count=$(($#-3))
 local comp_function_name="$1"
 shift 2
 local function="
 function $function_name 
 ((COMP_CWORD+=$arg_count))
 COMP_WORDS=( "$@" $COMP_WORDS[@]:1 )
 "$comp_function_name"
 return 0
 "
 eval "$function"
 echo $function_name
 echo "$function"

Use it to define a completion function for your alias, then specify that function as a completer for the alias:

make-completion-wrapper _apt_get _apt_get_install apt-get install
complete -F _apt_get_install apt-inst

I prefer to use aliases for adding always-used arguments to existing programs. For instance, with grep, I always want to skip devices and binary files, so I make an alias for grep. For adding new commands such as grepbin, I use a shell script in my ~/bin folder. If that folder is in your path, it will get autocompleted.

Try complete-alias, which solves this problem exactly.

After install it you can use one generic function to complete many aliases like this:

complete -F _complete_alias <myalias1>
complete -F _complete_alias <myalias2>
complete -F _complete_alias <myalias3>

You may want to source the complete_alias file in every bash instance through .bash_profile or similar.

installation

mkdir ~/.bash_completion.d
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cykerway/complete-alias/master/completions/bash_completion.sh 
 > ~/.bash_completion.d/complete_alias

application

source ~/.bash_completion.d/complete_alias

alias container=docker container
complete -F _complete_alias container

container can now be autocompleted by the original _docker() completion handler;

$ container l<Tab>
logs ls 

$ container s<Tab>
start stats stop 

Here's the code from Shawn J. Goff's answer with some improvements:

• Fixed syntax errors highlighted by shell-check, eg the first " of "$@" actually ended the function definition string.


• Removed the return 0 so that the return value of the underlying function can be passed back to the caller.

.

# Wraps a completion function, eg for use with an alias.
# Usage:
# make-completion-wrapper <actual completion function> <name of new func.>
# <command name> <list supplied arguments>
# eg.
# alias agi='apt-get install'
# make-completion-wrapper _apt_get _apt_get_install apt-get install
# # defines a function called _apt_get_install (that's $2) that will
# # complete the 'agi' alias. 
# complete -F _apt_get_install agi
function make-completion-wrapper 
 local function_name="$2"
 local arg_count=$(( $#-3 ))
 local comp_function_name="$1"
 shift 2
 local function="function $function_name 
 (( COMP_CWORD += $arg_count ))
 COMP_WORDS=( "$@" $COMP_WORDS[@]:1 )
 "$comp_function_name"
 "
 eval "$function"
 # echo "$function"

export -f make-completion-wrapper

2018 answer

You must add your alias to the program 'complete'. Depending the kind of autocompletion you want to achieve, you must use -c or -F.

For package autocompletion:

complete -c name_of_your_alias

For command autocompletion:

complete -F name_of_your_alias

To check if your alias was added correctly:

complete | grep name_of_your_alias

Finally, to remove an alias from 'complete':

complete -r name_of_your_alias

In your case:

complete -c apt-inst