Can't really help you about tab completion. You could read in the keypresses chararcter by character and write your own parser. But i guess this should already be a solved problem.

A workaround would be to use Term::Readline. You could - for example - prepolulate the history. Something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Term::ReadLine;

my $term = Term::ReadLine->new('Tabtest');
my $prompt = "Test your tabs, guv: ";

if ($^O eq "MSWin32" || $^O eq "dos") {
    my $INPUT;
    open($INPUT, "<con")
        and $term->newTTY($INPUT, $term->OUT);
}

foreach my $command (qw[print hello echo foo bar baz]) {
    $term->addhistory($command);
}

while(defined(my $line = $term->readline($prompt))) {
        chomp $line;
        exit if($line eq "exit");
        print "I don't know how to '$line'\n";
        $term->addhistory($line);
}
[download]

Thanks for your answer. And yes, I thought it would have been solved too.

As for your code, I'm not sure I understand. Command history already works.

Maybe I should have Term::ReadLine::Gnu. But I can't install it. It says libtermcap.a or libcurses.a is missing. Anybody know what I should be doing?

libtermcap.a or libcurses.a is missing. Anybody know what I should be doing?

Install libetrmcap or libcurses, obviously :)

Or try Term::ReadLine::Perl

Hmm, unsetting term=dumb doesn't work for me on winxp, which windows do you have?

I'm using Windows 7. I think you must have Term::ReadLine::Perl installed. Otherwise, Term::ReadLine::Stub will be used, which doesn't do word completion.

Please forgive me (and feel free to downvote me) if this is a silly question - I know next to zero about Unix tab completion - but in what way does cmd.exe's own tab completion fail to meet your needs?

cmd.exe can complete file and directory names. Well, most of the time anyway. And it has a (not very smart) history of the commands you previously typed. But thats just about it.

Modern unix shells are way smarter and more flexible than that. Take this introduction for bash for example (part 2 is here): You can configure it more or less any way you like. A look at the bash manual reveals a ton of other possibilities as well.

And there's a bunch of other smart shells out there as well. On Linux/Unix just pick what you like.

On Windows, you have to install Cygwin... To be fair, Windows was not designed to be used from the command line while Unix was. Windows was actually designed to move the User away from the command line - which didn't work out so well. In the last few years Microsoft reversed direction and started projects like the PowerShell. And now they are moving to JavaScript ;-)

Don't use '#ff0000':
use Acme::AutoColor; my $redcolor = RED();
All colors subject to change without notice.

tab completion on cmd.exe does pwd readdir completion, or C:\WIN*TAB* becomes C:\WINDOWS

That is great if that is what you want, but if you want to provide your own keywords, not so much

http://deps.cpantesters.org/depended-on-by.pl?dist=TermReadKey-2.30

Here is a proof of concept, uses Data::Dump::Streamer and cpan STSI/TermReadKey-2.30.02.tar.gz (or cpanp i STSI/TermReadKey-2.30.02.tar.gz)

use Term::ReadKey;
use strict; use warnings;
my @completion_list = qw[ ro sham bo foo bar baz ];
{
    my $orig_prompt = "Hi: ";
    my $prompt = $orig_prompt;
    my $prev_prompt = $orig_prompt;
    my $tab = do {
        my $ix = -1;
        my $xx = @completion_list  - 1;
        sub {
            $ix++;
            return $completion_list[  $ix % $xx ];
        };
    };
    $|=1;
    print $prompt;
    my $key ;
    while( 1 ){
        $key = ReadKey(-1);
        next unless defined $key;
        if( $key eq "\r"){
            print "\n";
            last;
        } elsif( $key eq "\t" ){
            my $completion = $tab->();
            $prompt = $orig_prompt . $completion;

#~ FAIL             print "\b" x ( 1 + length $prev_prompt ), $prompt;
#~ FAIL             print "\b" x ( 100 ), $prompt;
#~ FAIL             print "\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\
+b\b\b\b$prompt";
            print "\r" , " " x ( length $prev_prompt );
            print "\r", $prompt;
            $prev_prompt = $prompt;
        } elsif( $key eq "\e") {
            print "\r" , " " x ( length $prev_prompt );
            $prompt = $orig_prompt ;
            print "\r", $prompt;
            $prev_prompt = $prompt;
        } else {
            use DDS; warn Dump $key ;
        }
    }
    use DDS; warn Dump [ $key, $orig_prompt, $prompt, $prev_prompt ] ;
}
[download]

It could make a great addition to Term::Interact/example

Thanks a lot for your script. It works.

So it means I have to reinvent the wheel and come up with my own readline function with tab completion support. I'll do that then, with the help of your script.

Thanks again. :-)

Well, Stamm wants to write a console Perl script that features tab completion. It seems most (all?) Perl modules tested so far seem to rely on some unix feature or other, or just don't support tab completion.

Tab completion does not necessarily means name completion. For example, an interactive Eliza program might use it as well. So if the user types

# I like tab c(tab)

tab completion might turn it into

# I like tab completion.

to which the correct response would be of course

Tell me more.

Don't use '#ff0000':
use Acme::AutoColor; my $redcolor = RED();
All colors subject to change without notice.

Ok, so not in cmd, but at his own prompt.