How to make alias to systemctl with autocomplete

I tried

alias sct='systemctl'
complete -F _systemctl sct

But the function _systemctl is not found until I run the original command systemctl in the session. This function loads dynamically or somehow and contains many other same functions inside.

OS - Ubuntu 20.04

3 Answers

Create a file named /etc/bash_completion.d/systemctl:

if [[ -r /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/systemctl ]]; then . /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/systemctl && complete -F _systemctl systemctl sct
fi

^{You can restart bash-completion by sourcing . /etc/bash_completion}

1

Just

alias sct='systemctl'
_completion_loader systemctl
complete -F _systemctl sct

But I recommend use bash function instead of bash alias so you can define some shortcuts for sub commands, here is an example:

sct ()
{ case $1 in e) shift; sudo systemctl enable --now "$@" ;; d) shift; sudo systemctl disable --now "$@" ;; s) shift; systemctl status "$@" ;; S) shift; sudo systemctl stop "$@" ;; r) shift; sudo systemctl restart "$@" ;; *) systemctl "$@" ;; esac
}

In addition, in order to make bash completion work for these shortcuts, you need to add them to array VERBS in corresponding keys in /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/systemctl. Here is an example for sct e :

 local -A VERBS=( ...
- [DISABLED_UNITS]='enable'
+ [DISABLED_UNITS]='enable e' ... )

But these modifications in /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/systemctl may lost over an update. I haven't found a perfect way to override it yet, maybe later.

I found a file with autocomplete functions for systemctl in my system and added a line to load it:

source /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/systemctl
alias sct='systemctl'
complete -F _systemctl sct

5

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