Re: Tab completion misbehaves with newlines

[Chet Ramey]

On 7/15/15 11:25 AM, Greg Wooledge wrote:

> OK, after a bit more testing, there is certainly something interesting
> here that I don't quite understand, but which Chet probably will.
> 
> I have two files: 'bad' and $'bad\nfile'
> 
> I type:
> 
> $ cat bad
> 
> and press Tab twice.  (The first does nothing visible.)  This gives me
> two completion choices:
> 
> bad        bad^Jfile
> 
> If I press Ctrl-V Ctrl-J, the cursor moves to the next line.  At this
> point, further Tabbing (with or without characters) acts like a new
> completion rather than a continuation of the previous completion, as
> this bug report indicated.

I answered this in another message; it's not a bug.

> 
> But if instead I type:
> 
> $ cat 'bad
> 
> and then press Tab twice, I get the same completion choices:
> 
> bad        bad^Jfile
> 
> Then if I press Ctrl-V Ctrl-J Tab, I end up with:
> 
> $ cat 'bad
> file' 
> 
> So, quoting the filename works around the bug, but readline isn't quite
> clever enough to do that on its own yet.

Readline understands quoted strings using single and double quotes, and
will allow you to quote the newline with a backslash.  But when you
present readline with unquoted word separators, it will use them to
separate words.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/