Disable bash autocompletion for combinations of specific commands and specific filetypes

Question

In the current directory, if we have a C++ source file, hello_world.cpp and the corresponding compiled executable binary hello_world, I'd like to have the autocomplete feature of bash to completely ignore (i.e. avoid presenting) the executable's filename for the vim, vi, nano and nvim (and for less, cat, more, nl, head, tail etc.) commands.

i.e. pressing TAB after vim hello_wor should just straightaway proceed to completing the c++ source filename.

How can we achieve this behaviour?

Answer 1

You could write your own programmable completion function for those commands, let's call it _cpp and set it with

complete -F _cpp vim vi nano nvim less cat more nl head tail

I am not writing the whole function now but you would generate (and discard) matches like this:

files=( $(compgen -f hello_) )
COMPREPLY=()
for word in "${files[@]}"; do
    if [[ $word = *.cpp ]]; then
        COMPREPLY+=("$word")
    else
        if [[ ! -f "${word}.cpp" ]]; then
            COMPREPLY+=("$word")
        fi
    fi
done

With touch hello_world hello_world.cpp hello_world2 this gives:

echo ${COMPREPLY[@]}
hello_world.cpp hello_world2