[SOLVED] Hints for custom bash completion

Hints for custom bash completion

I am developing a custom bash completion command to capture job IDs from a scheduling system (LSF, PBS, SLURM). I've got the basic functionality, but I would like to extend it now with "hints" that I've seen when running zsh.

For instance when I press TAB in grep example below, I get:

grep -<TAB>
     --after-context          -A           -- specify lines of trailing context
     --basic-regexp           -G           -- use basic regular expression
     --before-context         -B           -- specify lines of leading context
...

This third column after -- is what I would like to add to my own bash completion. What is the correct technical term for it? Hints? Does compgen provide a functionality to do it?

I am attaching my current working example which provides IDs only. The example uses LSF.

# LSF Job ID completion
function _mycurrentjobs()
{
    local cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$(bjobs -noheader -u $USER -o JOBID)" -- $cur))
    return 0
}
complete -F _mycurrentjobs bkill bjobs bstatus bpeek bstop bresume

The command that would provide IDs and my desired hints is: bjobs -noheader -u $USER -o "JOBID JOB_NAME"

Solution

After reviewing a similar post about host completion bash autocompletion: add description for possible completions I got the right behaviour more or less. I am using - as a delimiter in my job id query command

function _mycurrentjobs()
{
    local cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    local OLDIFS="$IFS"
    local IFS=$'\n'
    COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$(bjobs -noheader -u $USER \
        -o "JOBID JOB_NAME delimiter='-'")" -- $cur))
    IFS="$OLDIFS"
    if [[ ${#COMPREPLY[*]} -eq 1 ]]; then   #Only one completion
        COMPREPLY=( ${COMPREPLY[0]%%-*} )   #Remove the separator and everything after
    fi
    return 0
}
complete -F _mycurrentjobs bkill bjobs bstatus bpeek bstop bresume