fish_update_completions in Slackware 14.1

I’ve been trying out fish shell lately. A cool feature with fish is that it can automatically generate completions by parsing the installed man pages by running fish_update_completions.

Unfortunately this is what I got:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/share/fish/tools/create_manpage_completions.py", line 963, in 
    file_paths.extend(get_paths_from_manpath())
  File "/usr/local/share/fish/tools/create_manpage_completions.py", line 894, in get_paths_from_manpath
    proc = subprocess.Popen(['manpath'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 711, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1308, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

The solution for me was to install man-db from Slackbuilds and add /opt/man-db/bin and /opt/man-db/sbin to PATH to get fish to find the command manpath. The dependency for man-db is undocumented but it’s a known issue.

During the installation I got several strange errors error: cannot run C compiled programs which I have no idea why they came up. Eventually by retrial I got it to work.

Curiouly enough fish couldn’t parse several of the slackware specific man pages. I manually made completions for exlodepkg, installpkg, makepkg, removepkg, slackpkg and upgradepkg which can be found at https://github.com/treeman/dotfiles/tree/master/.config/fish/completions. Of these removepkg was the real motivator as natively it didn’t autocomplete installed packages. I added the rest more for the sake of completeness. These are not super great and I’m not sure if anyone else will find it useful. I might consider trying to add them to fish later.