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What is the correct/best way of handling spaces and quotes in bash completion? Here’s a simple example. I have a command called words (e.g., a dictionary lookup program) that takes various words as arguments. The supported ‘words’ may actually contain spaces, and are defined in a file called words.dat : foo bar one bar two Here’s my first suggested solution: _find_words() { search="$cur" grep -- "^$search" words.dat } _words_complete() { local IFS=$'\n' COMPREPLY=() cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}" COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "$(_find_words)" -- "$cur" ) ) } complete -F _words_complete words Typing ‘words f<tab>’ correctly completes the command to ‘words foo ’ (with a trailing space), which is nice, but for ‘words b<tab>’ it suggests ‘words bar ’ . The correct completion would be ‘words bar\ ’ . And for ‘words "b<tab>’ and ‘words 'b<tab>’ it offers no suggestions. This last part I have been able to solve. It’s possible to use eval to properly parse the (escaped) characters. However, eval is not fond of missing quotes, so to get everything to work, I had to change the search="$cur" to search=$(eval echo "$cur" 2>/dev/null || eval echo "$cur'" 2>/dev/null || eval echo "$cur\"" 2>/dev/null || "") This actually works. Both ‘words "b<tab>’ and ‘words 'b<tab>’ correctly autocompletes, and if I add a ‘o’ and press <tab> again, it actually completes the word and adds the correct closing quote. However, if I try to complete ‘words b<tab>’ or even ‘words bar\ <tab>’ , it is autocompleted to ‘words bar ’ instead of ‘words bar\ ’ , and adding for

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