Properly handling spaces and quotes in bash completion

Question

What is the correct/best way of handling spaces and quotes in bash completion?

Here’s a simple example. I have a command called words (e.g., a dictionar

Answer 1

Pipe _find_words through sed and have it enclose each line in quotation marks. And when typing a command line, make sure to put either " or ' before a word to be tab-completed, otherwise this method will not work.

_find_words() { cat words.dat; }

_words_complete()
{

  COMPREPLY=()
  cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"

  local IFS=$'\n'
  COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "$( _find_words | sed 's/^/\x27/; s/$/\x27/' )" \
                         -- "$cur" ) )

}

complete -F _words_complete words

Command line:

$ words "ba░

tab

$ words "bar ░

tabtab

bar one  bar two
$ words "bar o░

tab

$ words "bar one" ░