Showing only the substrings of COMPREPLY bash completion options to the user

Question

In a bash completion script, suppose COMPREPLY=(aa/ba/ aa/bb/). When the script is invoked, the completion options looks like this to the user:

Answer 1

I was having the same problem and I fixed it by adjusting how I bound the completion function to the command. I know this works when you are dealing with actual files in the filesystem, I think it will work with any sort of file path like options, but I'm not sure.

Before:

complete -F _fubar fubar

After:

complete -o filenames -F _fubar fubar

For more details: Programmable Completion Builtins