Based on a blog post by John Hitchings on the WealthFront Engineering web site, I started looking into bash completion.

As a Java developer, I use Maven from the command-line quite a bit, so I decided to add bash completion for the ‘mvn’ command.

The following script works great on OS X, and should work in bash on other systems as well.

Happy completion!

_mvn()
{
    local cur prev opts
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
    prev="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}"
    opts="clean compile package install"

    if [[ ${cur} == * ]] ; then
        COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${opts}"  ${cur}) )
        return 0
    fi
}
complete -F _mvn mvn

From http://greybeardedgeek.net/2011/02/bash-completion-for-maven/