HOCO - zsh hosts completion

Small function to improve and extend original zsh _hosts completion function.

Objectives

The original zsh hosts completion is not extendable. And when you replace it with zstyle -e ':completion:*:hosts' hosts 'reply=(...)', all original completions should be represented too.

On the other hand, _hosts caches all hosts for autocompletion only once, and then uses it. And it's not so obvious how to reset it.

Solution

The hoco.zsh solves both _hosts flaws:

• It updates the cache once per $HOCO_CACHE_AGE period, the default is 10 minutes
• It allows to update list of hosts dynamically. Each binary or function in $HOCO_FUNCTIONS array is executed asynchronously. The list of hosts for completion is updated on readiness.

Usage

The only thing you need to do is:

source hoco.zsh
some-function() {
  echo host1 host2 # it does not matter if hosts are separated by spaces
  echo host3	host4 # or by new lines (LF), or by tabs
}
HOCO_FUNCTIONS=(some-function)

ssh <tab>