tecla

The tecla library provides UNIX and LINUX programs with interactive command line editing facilities, similar to those of the UNIX tcsh shell. In addition to simple command-line editing, it supports recall of previously entered command lines, TAB completion of file names or other tokens, and in-line wild-card expansion of filenames. The internal functions which perform file-name completion and wild-card expansion are also available externally for optional use by programs. In addition, the library includes a path-searching module. This allows an application to provide completion and lookup of files located in UNIX style paths. Although not built into the line editor by default, it can easily be called from custom tab-completion callback functions. This was originally conceived for completing the names of executables and providing a way to look up their locations in the user's PATH environment variable, but it can easily be asked to look up and complete other types of files in any list of directories. Note that special care has been taken to allow the use of this library in threaded programs. The option to enable this is discussed in the Makefile, and specific discussions of thread safety are presented in the included man pages.