Re: Filename completion causes doubling of initial ':' character

[Chet Ramey]

On 12/4/16 8:14 PM, L A Walsh wrote:
> Chet Ramey wrote:
>> The short answer is that colon is special to readline: it breaks words for
>> the readline completion code. If you want to complete filenames beginning
>> with a colon, either quote the colon or remove colon from $COMP_WORDBREAKS.
>> If you're using bash-completion, it may have its own problems with colons.


> Does readline have any config element in .inputrc to allow specifying
> what the word-break characters are as 'isearch-terminators' can specify
> a list of characters that terminate an incremental search or IFS specifies
> a list of characters that will be used to split a line into words?

Applications can use various mechanisms to specify the characters that
should break words for the readline word completer.  It's an application-
specific setting, since different applications have different syntax.  Bash
happens to use the COMP_WORDBREAKS variable, which is reflected as the
value of readline's rl_completer_word_break_characters variable.

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