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Re: Exported (ba)sh functions in the environment



[Philip Ashmore]
> I guess I'm confused as to why bash completion needs these.

Easy enough to read /etc/bash_completion and /etc/bash_completion.d/*
and see for yourself why it needs these.

bash-completion is full of special cases to "do the right thing" in
hundreds or thousands of different circumstances.  If it were as simple
as "offer a list of filenames when you hit tab", that's already built
in to bash and we wouldn't need bash-completion as a separate package.

As a _very_ simple example, if you type 'kill <tab>', you get a list of
current process IDs.  If you type 'kill -<tab>', you get a list of
signals, plus the common options -l and -s.

If you can think of a way to implement this same stuff (and remember,
bash-completion supports a _lot_ more complex cases than 'kill')
without adding 200 kB of shell functions to bash's runtime, by all
means, do it and see how it works out.

Peter


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