Shell program argument tab-completion, how?

[Erikw]

Hey!

For example:

$ find / -i <tab>
ilname iname  inum   ipath  iregex

So apparently you van get tab-completion not only for files but also for arguments to programs. How does this work? Is my shell communicating with the program and fetching a list of matching parameters? Does it guess by parsing the man file?

I'm curious to know. Thanks in advance.

[raghaven.kumar]

Maybe this can help you?
linux - bash alias with argument and autocompletion - Stack Overflow
autocomplete - Add arguments from previous command to zsh completion - Unix and Linux - Stack Exchange

try googling, i think in zsh u have options for this.
in bash, i suppose u have to create a 'alias'.

[Kloschüssel]

the shell interprets the <tab> as input and suggests autocompletion candidates. if you wanted to search for a file whichs name contained a <tab>, you would have to hack \t which would be used by find as a <tab>. this behaves similar to other non-readable characters like \r,\n, ..