bash-completion

Bash-completion does something like this for commands with consistent --help output (most Coreutils, bash, awk, grep, sed...) by parsing it in the completion function: https://github.com/scop/bash-completion/blob/29508ce70914f78...

> - Oh-my-zsh has a lot of plugins for auto-completion As does bash-completion, which is available in many (but not all :-/) Linux distros and via Homebrew on MacOS and [pre-dates](https://github.com/scop/bash-completion/tree/09b07d57a7031d9...) [oh-my-zsh](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/tree/5da20b9dddb1f7a91106...) by about 6 years. But, zsh users and oh-my-zsh fan-boys seem to be entirely ignorant of bash-completion.

When you install bash-completion on your system, usually a function is defined to autocomplete make rules for you. It works with all projects, as it does not rely on the rules being specially marked. (https://github.com/scop/bash-completion/blob/master/completi...) Before I knew about it, I had written a similar thing: # Autocomplete make rules _make () { local cur prev words cword cmdline _init_completion || return # command to generate the rules words="$(make -pRrq |\ awk -v RS= -F: '/^# File/,/^# Finished Make data base/ {if ($1 !~ "^[#.]") {print $1}}' |\ sort | egrep -v -e '^[^[:alnum:]]' | xargs)" COMPREPLY+=( $( compgen -W "$words" -- $cur) ) } if declare -f _init_completion > /dev/null; then complete -F _make make fi It relies o