114

I have this on the command line:

ln -sf $PWD/wine-

and then I hit Tab to complete the filename. In earlier versions of Ubuntu, this worked just fine to complete the wine- filename (and as a side-effect $PWD would be expanded at that time). But now it turns it in to

ln -sf \$PWD/wine-

which isn't what I meant at all and doesn't complete anything as the file does not literally start with $.

How do I get completion back to the less broken behaviour?

set tells me these are my current settings:

BASHOPTS=checkwinsize:cmdhist:expand_aliases:extquote:force_fignore:hostcomplete:interactive_comments:progcomp:promptvars:sourcepath
SHELLOPTS=braceexpand:emacs:hashall:histexpand:history:interactive-comments:monitor
Eliah Kagan
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keturn
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9 Answers9

99

I've found that bash versions >= 4.2.29 have a new direxpand shopt setting. (See man docs/bash.1 if you check out a new bash, or see bash.1 from line 8951)

If one uses Quantal Quetzal 12.10 or otherwise gets hold of (or checks out and builds) a new bash, then:

shopt -s direxpand

Gives me the behavior I want, need and love.

Workaround: In the meantime, Ctrl+Alt+E instead of Tab does what I want too. But is awkward.

BTW, There are several threads called "bash tab variable expansion question?" in gnu.bash.bug. From reading them, I found the info here.

Eliah Kagan
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Peter V. Mørch
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46
shopt -u progcomp

This fixed it for me, it also removed a lot of "intelligent" completion options which I have found get in the way by not completing files that I know are there because the stupid thing thinks I don't want them as arguments to a particular command. ARRRGH

user3080602
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6

On GNU bash, version 4.2.46(2)-release, the options complete_fullquote and noquote aren't available. The cdable_vars option works on cd only; direxpand expands the variable.

What worked best for me was:

shopt -u progcomp

It worked on other commands, besides cd, preserving the variables instead of expanding them.

Eliah Kagan
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rsn86
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6

search _filedir() in the top level bash_completion script and change the line 

compopt -o filenames 2>/dev/null

to

compopt -o filenames -o noquote 2>/dev/null
guntbert
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mba
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2

For those (like me) with 12.04 can use ~+ instead of $PWD...

for example :

cd /bin
echo ~+/ls
/bin/ls
Tony
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1

Disabling the shell option 'complete_fullquote' does the job:

shopt -u complete_fullquote
Michael Ryan
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1

If you do not care for programmable completion (usually installed by bash-completion), then any method mentioned here to disable those will do (like shopt -u progcomp).

If you want Bash to expand the variable when you type TAB, then shopt -s direxpand will do.

If you do not want to use shopt -s direxpand, and want to keep programmable completions from bash-completion, and you have root access, you can apply the same patch as Ubuntu applies, i.e. this patch.

If you do not have root access you can disable the system bash-completion (see bash-completion's README and install a patched version in your $HOME (download and extract the tarball and --configure --prefix=$HOME or similar)

EDIT the above is valid for Bash 4.4.19. It seems Bash 5.0 and above break the whole thing again...

philb
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1

Even with the updated bash, I was finding $ still gets escaped.

  • Removing the bash-completion (1:2.1-3.fc20) package
  • or simply not sourcing /etc/bashrc from ~/.bashrc seemed to fix it.

I suspect I'll now be missing some features I'm normally used to but haven't noticed any yet.

Alternative (at least for Fedora 26), add export BASH_COMPLETION_VERSINFO=0 before sourcing /etc/bashrc. This makes the problematic script think its already been sourced.

jozxyqk
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0

Note that the "shopt -u progcomp" proposed above is extremely invasive, as it disables all programmable completions, hence the effects mentioned on make, git, etc.

As it turns out, the problem has now gone through another couple of ups and down. The latest was in Bash 5.1 (seen e.g. in Debian 11), and the full story is here:

https://github.com/scop/bash-completion/issues/290 "Completion of valid paths involving variables adds backslashes"

TL;DR: fixed in 5.2

Alexandre Ferrieux
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