---
title: "You really can do bash completion with spaces!"
date: 2016-04-29
updated: 2026-09-26
canonical: https://michaelshadle.com/2016/04/28/you-really-can-do-bash-completion-with-spaces
---

# You really can do bash completion with spaces!

A short period ago when I was working on my little [ec2ssh](https://github.com/mike503/ec2ssh/) project I ran into the issue of tab completion not working for things with spaces in them.

This was my first foray into the world of bash completion, so I incorrectly thought "this can't be that hard - everything has completion now."

After Googling for hours, trying various things, finding statements saying that it wasn't possible - I stumbled upon the solution. It works properly and was surprisingly easy.

The `compgen` command typically works with spaces for the word separators. What I had to do was make sure the source data was separated by something else, such as a linebreak (`\n`) and then tell `compgen` that was the separator.

So this line before the `compgen` command was key:

```bash
local IFS=$'\n'
```

Next, the `complete` command still won't work without feeding it the `-o filenames` option. This seems to be critical, telling it to behave like we are dealing with filenames makes it work properly. Note that I couldn't even find the original example that led me to this solution right now. *It's that undocumented.*

```bash
complete -o filenames
```

If you'd like to see this put altogether, in a very easy to read, semi-documented autocomplete script, check it out here:  
[https://github.com/mike503/ec2ssh/blob/master/ec2ssh.bash_completion.sh](https://github.com/mike503/ec2ssh/blob/master/ec2ssh.bash_completion.sh)