GCC Picks Up Meaningful Bash Completion Support To Help With Compiler Options

One of the advantages of the LLVM Clang compiler has been better integration with Bash completion support, but now the GCC compiler supports a --completion argument for feeding into the Bash completion script with better matching of supported options/values when typing into a supported terminal.

Martin Liška of SUSE started earlier this year on proper Bash completion support for GCC after being inspired by Clang's --autocomplete option. As of yesterday, the new GCC --completion option is supported by mainline GCC for next year's GCC 9 compiler.

This support is much better than the basic Bash completion scripts that have been available up to this point for the GNU Compiler Collection and should yield more matches of possible options/values when being typed by the user. This makes it much easier for those wondering about the possible values without having to resort to the man page or other GCC documentation when it comes to the sanitize features and other parameters, making for a nice usability improvement especially among new users/developers come GCC9.