How to use _known_hosts_real bash completion function?

[postmodern]

Instead of using the regular <hostname> suggestion keyword, I'd like to use Bash's _known_hosts_real function, which parses ssh's known_hosts file and avahi-browse -cpr _workstation._tcp to list commonly accessed host names.

[DannyBen]

There are three things that can be used as completions with completely:

• any string
• anything supported by compgen -A action
• any command available in your shell that returns whitespace delimited strings, using the $(...) syntax.

As I understand, _known_hosts_real is meant to be a private function (judging by the leading _, and it does not fit into any of the above categories. While it is available in your shell, it is not available to subshells (bash -c _known_hosts_real does not work).

So bottom line, unless you have a function that you can run in your shell, and that returns (outputs) whitespace delimited list of known hosts, I cannot think of a way to use it.

[DannyBen]

Another thing - in case you are looking for alternatives.

Using this configuration will show the known hosts from your ssh config:

# completely.yaml
mygit:
- $(grep -P "^Host ([^*]+)$" $HOME/.ssh/config | sed 's/Host //')

You can test it with completely test "mygit <search string>"

Perhaps you can use a similar approach to parse any other file that contains the desired information.