alt Hacker NewsIsn't there a standard flag which programs can implement to avoid writing this bash script?
Ideally this could all be part of a library such as argparse for typical cases, right?
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Rust has the clap_complete package for its most popular arg parsing library: https://crates.io/crates/clap_complete
ripgrep exposes its (bespoke) shell completion and man page generation through a --generate option: rg --generate=man, rg --generate=complete-bash, etcetera. In xh (clap-based) we provide the same but AFAIK we're the only one to copy that interface.
Symfony (for PHP) provides some kind of runtime completion generation but I don't know the details.
I've wondered this as well - it would sure be nice if there was a standard --completion or something that common argument parsing libraries could automatically implement for us (much like they often implement automatic help text)
In zsh you can use the _gnu_generic function for simple completion of commands with a --help flag. Just put a line like this somewhere in your startup file: compdef _gnu_generic <CMD>