I've added tab completion for my program to bash. It works quite well, but I don't know how to handle partial completion of words. Example: the user types ./program /home/user/De and presses TAB. This is then completed to ./program /home/user/Desktop/ , but there's now a trailing whitespace after 'Desktop/', which is not what I want. Basically, I need a way of preventing bash from adding whitespace after the completed word. I don't want to use bash's completion for paths.