Bash completion of aliased commands

**ninovolador** · April 12th, 2013

HELP! i',m sorry for reviving this old post, but this isn't (entirely) working for me!

Here is my output of "complete -p apt-get":
bash: complete: apt-get: no hay completado de especificación
(in english it would be "bash:complete: apt-get: no completion specification")

BUT when i do "apt-get <tab> <tab>" i still get the autocompletion feature. IN FACT, when i "complete -p apt-get" after that, i get "complete -F _apt_get apt-get"

Then, my alias do autocomplete, but if i close that terminal, it does not do that anymore..

any clues?

**Korn** · April 13th, 2013

Yes, this behavior also exists for apt-cache. It seems the function for bash completion only gets created at the first "apt-cache <tab>".
So I had to integrate this code in my alias completion code:

[ ! -f /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/apt-cache ] || source /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/apt-cache

The code you need is this:

[ ! -f /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/apt-get ] || source /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/apt-get

Call this before you call "complete -F".