bash alias with argument and autocompletion

Question

I have a bunch of scripts in directory that exists on the path, so I can access each wherever I am. Sometime those are very simple util scripts that \"vims\" the file. From tim

Answer 1

For the alias with argument, use function instead of aliases :

a() { cat `which $1` ;}

Or if you do it on more than one line, skip th semicolon :

a() {
    cat `which $1`
}

You can enter it interactively at the shell prompt :

shell:>a() {
>cat `which $1`
>}
shell:>

Answer 2

If your function is called "foo" then your completion function could look like this:

If you have the Bash completion package installed:

_foo () { local cur; cur=$(_get_cword); COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -c -- $cur ) ); return 0; }

If you don't:

_foo () { local cur; cur=${COMP_WORDS[$COMP_CWORD]}; COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -c -- $cur ) ); return 0; }

Then to enable it:

complete -F _foo foo

The command compgen -c will cause the completions to include all commands on your system.

Your function "foo" could look like this:

foo () { cat $(type -P "$@"; }

which would cat one or more files whose names are passed as arguments.