Bash completion for Maven escapes colon

From Bash FAQ E13.

Just after the complete command in the script you linked to, issue this command to remove the colon from the list of completion word break characters:

COMP_WORDBREAKS=${COMP_WORDBREAKS//:}

Here is a related question and another suggested solution:

How to reset COMP_WORDBREAKS without effecting other completion script?

As stated before, the simplest solution is to alter COMP_WORDBREAKS. However, modifying COMP_WORDBREAKS in your completion script is not safe (as it is a global variable and it has the side effect of affecting the behavior of other completion scripts - for example scp).

Therefore, bash completion offers some helper methods which you can use to achieve your goal in a better and more safer way.

Two helper methods were added in Bash completion 1.2 for this:

• _get_comp_words_by_ref with the -n EXCLUDE option
  
  • gets the word-to-complete without considering the characters in EXCLUDE as word breaks
• __ltrim_colon_completions
  • removes colon containing prefix from COMPREPLY items
    (a workaround for http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/FAQ - E13)

So, here is a basic example of how to a handle a colon (:) in completion words:

_mytool(){    local cur    _get_comp_words_by_ref -n : cur    # my implementation here    __ltrim_colon_completions "$cur"}complete -F _mytool mytool

Using the helper methods also simplifies the completion script and ensures that you get the same behavior on any environment (bash-3 or bash-4).

You can also take a look at man or perl completion scripts in /etc/bash_completion.d to see how they use the above helper methods to solve this problem.

Any suggestions how this can be fixed? I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 (2.6.27-17-generic) and

Dennis answer is definitely correct.

But for the record, there is a logged issue (MNG-3928) to improve the documentation about the Maven integration with bash. The issue has a script attached which is an improved version of the one currently online and just works. You might want to give it a try.

Personally, I use the Bash Completion script from Ludovic Claude's PPA (the one that is bundled into the maven package from Ubuntu) that I download directly from bazaar (her e is a direct download link to the HEAD revision). It is just awesome.