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I am unable to open a pdf file which starts with (. For example: (3311) M3N78-EM.pdf
Are there any arguments to be given?
I have invoked with evince command.
When I type evince (and press tab, nothing happens. In other words, tab completion doesn't work after (.
Can anyone help?

Sylwester
  • 715
user178196
  • 11

1 Answers1

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To use tab completion you need to escape some symbols that are used by the shell for other purposes. Parenthesis, hyphen, and dollar sign are some of them that needs a backslash escape so that the shell doesn't think you are trying to do something else. A different way to do it is to use single quote. That will escape everything except single quotes within.

Try:

evince '(TAB

If you have more than one match you just continue writing and pressing TAB until you have a unique match.

The alternatives are:

evince "(TAB

Here you cannot use $ in the file name since the shell will think it's a variable.

evince \(TAB

You need to backslash every char that needs to while you are finding a unique match. Eg. if it stops at \(3311 you need to type \)TAB to continue.

Sylwester
  • 715