[OpenAFS-devel] Exploring approach for OpenAFS shell completion support

[Michael Meffie]

On Mon, 9 Mar 2026 15:32:00 +0530
Vaibhav Sharma <sharma31stmay@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I recently joined the mailing list and I’m interested in contributing to
> OpenAFS, particularly the proposed project on implementing shell completion
> for OpenAFS commands (GSOC-2026, Idea list).
> 
> I have experience working with C and shell environments, and recently built
> an offline AI-based shell assistant that interacts with CLI tools. Because
> of that, the idea of improving the usability of OpenAFS command-line tools
> caught my attention.
> 
> I’ve started exploring the OpenAFS repository and the available CLI tools
> to understand how command parsing and options are currently implemented.
> 
> Before going deeper, I wanted to ask:
> 
> 1. Which command implementations would be the best starting point for
> studying how CLI arguments and subcommands are defined?
> 2. Is there any existing work or discussion around generating shell
> completions automatically from the command definitions?
> 
> Any pointers on where to start in the codebase would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks for your time.
> 
> Best regards,
> Vaibhav Sharma

Hello Vaibhav,

Thank you for your interest in OpenAFS!  

All of the OpenAFS command line programs use an internal library to parse
the command line arguments.  The code for that library is located in
the src/cmd directory, and the unit tests are in tests/cmd.  This library
handles the "subcommand" processing and the option parsing.  It has
some quirks that makes it different than many command line programs.

This should be an interesting project. I don't think we have any
work in progress changes in gerrit or discussions on the list.

Best regards,
Mike

-- 
Michael Meffie <mmeffie@sinenomine.net>