COMPREPLY scope

[Mario Signorino]

Hi all

I need some help and possibly also an advice.

Is it possible to retrieve the COMPREPLY variable outside and/or after calling 
the complete function? 
I'm working a special terminal emulator inherited from gnome-terminal. I want 
to modify the common TAB behaviour and manipulate the result of all 
TAB-completions: any string generated from the complete builtin function (and 
also any other bash-completion extension) should go handled by me.   

Ex: if in the terminal a TAB is pressed after a "ls /" I want to get all the 
"bin/ initrd.img mnt/ selinux/ vmlinuz ...". Also I want the "add commit init 
repack ..." given after a "git "+TAB.

My idea was to call something like a getenv("COMPREPLY") from whitin my 
terminal emulator, read the result and then decide what&if to display to the 
user.
But in the source I can see this (pcomplete.c):
/* XXX - should we unbind COMPREPLY here? */
  unbind_variable ("COMPREPLY");
Ehm! So there is no way...?
Also I would need to know if in the COMPREPLY there are filenames or not.

I could trap any user TAB press and treat all the following strings from the 
pty as result of a completion (until I get the prompt again)... but then I 
should at least know if a program is running or not: maybe the user is just 
pressing tab inside vim.
I do not know how to do that, and anyway it sounds like a bad hack... 

Also I cannot modify any part of the the existing system: my terminal will run 
mostly remotely connected over ssh. Of course I could run some bash script at 
login, but I have to keep it simple.

Another idea is to add a delimitation around the completion result: I could 
trap it easily. But I did not find how do that.
Last idea: trap the TAB from the user input and call directly the complete() 
readline function, putting the result somewhere in the env (or directly in my 
code). How?
In the end it seems readline already has everything I need: I simply do not 
know how to access its info.  

I'm not actually sure if this is the right place for this question...
Any helps or suggestion will be appreciated.

Tnx
Mario