On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 04:52:03PM -0400, Grisha Levit wrote: > On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 4:11 PM Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: > > OK, which do you think would be the more common case? Wanting the options > > used to generate completions to persist or using it in this way? > > Usually people do `COMPREPLY=($(compgen ...))' (or write to stdout in > a command specified with `complete -C') so nothing persists anyway, > right? > > I don't know if there's really any use case that generates completions > to place into COMPREPLY by running compgen in the foreground so it's > hard for me to imagine a use case that benefits from the readline > state being modified.
I don't use programmable completion, but I could *imagine* someone using a temp file to store the results, then using mapfile to read them back in, to avoid the fork() that the command substitution uses. You'd need a non-forking way to create the temp file, and to remove it, though, or you'll lose all your gains in those steps. I have no idea whether anyone actually does it that way in real life.
