Question

I have a Bash tab-completion script for Apache’s Hadoop. Normally, I use zsh as my day-to-day shell. It tends to be pretty bash-like when I need it to be, but it looks like the tab-completion systems are radically different between them. Is there a simple way to “convert” the existing bash-tab-completion definitions to work in zsh? I don’t want to invest a ton of time in this, but if it’s easy I’d save a moderate amount of effort.

Answer 1

From this page (dated 2010/01/05):

Zsh can handle bash completions functions. The latest development version of zsh has a function bashcompinit, that when run will allow zsh to read bash completion specifications and functions. This is documented in the zshcompsys man page. To use it all you need to do is run bashcompinit at any time after compinit. It will define complete and compgen functions corresponding to the bash builtins.