Re: ordering of file-patterns completions

[John <jmharres@gmail.com>]

On 11/6/13, 9:03 AM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Nov 6,  8:24am, John wrote:
> }
> } I have a tool which needs one file-patterns for the first file matched,
> } then the second and the rest should be of a different file-patterns.  I
> } don't see a way to do this.
>
> You probably want to write a custom completer with the _arguments utility
> function, and to leave file-patterns unspecified.
>
>
>      _foo() {
>        _arguments '1:The first file:_files -g "XXX.*"' \
> 		 '*:All other files:_files -g "*.${words[2]:x}"'
>      }
>
>      compdef _foo foo
>
> Here "1:" refers to the first argument (after skipping the command name
> and any option flags) whereas "$words[2]" refers to the second word
> of the entire command line (first word after the command name), so this
> doesn't quite generalize if there may be options (words starting with
> a hyphen) between the command name and the first file.  If that is the
> case, you'll need to do some pre-processing of $words before calling
> _arguments to determine which position to reference instead of [2].
Yeah, unfortunately I do.  I was using _arguments to process those, and 
then zstyle to deal with the files.  But I'm not quite understanding how 
to do what you're describing to pre-process them instead of using 
_arguments.
>
> (You can skip the "compdef" command if you put the body of _foo in a file
> named _foo in a directory referenced in your $fpath, and begin that file
> with the line "#compdef foo".)
>
> } Are there any examples of something similar to this around?
>
> There are lots of examples of using _arguments in the default set of
> completion functions.  If there is a standard tool that you know of that
> accepts arguments something like your custom one, try looking at the
> completion function for that.  You can usually find the name of that
> function by looking at ${_comps[command-name-here]}.

I searched through a number of them, but haven't found anything which 
has helped yet.

John