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up vote 11 down vote favorite
4

The bash autocomplete feature does not seem to work with environment variables in 11.04. The current behavior is indicated below

export SCRIPT=/home/user/script
cd $SCRIPT/<tab>

results in a \ being added before $SCRIPT i.e. the prompt becomes

cd \$SCRIPT/

Same thing happens if cd is substituted with ls or any other command

Also, if there is an executable file in the path contained in $SCRIPT and I want to run that 

$SCRIPT/<tab>

Bash does not show the options inside the folder (regardless of whether there is a single file or multiple files/directories inside the path contained in the environment variables).

In other words, autocomplete does not work with environment variables.

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2  
Here's the bug in launchpad. – pydave May 10 '11 at 23:26
I think it does not have to do with the bash version (4.1 or 4.2). I've just installed bash-4.1 from sources and used it instead of the 4.2.24 (Ubuntu 12.04's version; installed from sources so i don't have to 'hold back' the package at each sys upgrade) and the behaviour is exactly the same. Very, very annoying... – user80307 Jul 30 '12 at 19:41

3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

This bug was introduced in bash 4.2. There's a lengthy thread about it here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2011-02/msg00274.html

In short, Chet Ramey, the developer of bash, isn't sure how to go about fixing it yet.

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Is there a way to revert to bash 4.1 ? – nilchat May 12 '11 at 4:37
A fix is on the way: Chet added a "direxpand" shopt to restore the old behavior. It's not in Oneiric yet. – Nelson Jan 29 '12 at 0:02
2  
It's surprising to me that so few people have complained about this. It's a big change from the way bash has worked for a number of years. – Scott Wilson Feb 12 '12 at 18:00
up vote 3 down vote

The workaround suggested in http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2011-02/msg00274.html is:

  1. use <Tab>to auto-complete your environment variable s.t. you command line says cd $MYVAR
  2. hit <Esc>+<Ctrl>-E to expand the current command line i.e. substitute $MYVAR by its value, the path
  3. add a / and then enjoy <Tab> auto-completion as usual

This assumes you are in emacs mode (set -o emacs) and have bash_completion set up sensibly for cd (e.g. complete -o nospace -F _cd cd).

Unfortunately this doesn't work in vi mode (set -o vi) because command line expansion is not available then.

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up vote 1 down vote

After typing the shell variable 

cd $SCRIPT/

type Cntrl-Alt-E. This expands the variable 

cd /home/user/script/

This does work with EDITOR=vi in Fedora 16.

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