special handling of colon during completion

[Ian Macdonald]

Hi,

In much the same way that one can use 'shopt -u hostcomplete' to turn
off the special handling of the '@' character when writing shell
functions for programmable completion, it would be nice to be able to
deactivate the special handling of ':'.

The fact that the colon resets completion for a given token can have
very unexpected side-effects when completing a token that should not
use path completion, usually resulting in mangled completions
containing a duplicate string of whatever had been typed up until
hitting the <Tab> key.

So, is there any chance of 'shopt -u pathcomplete' or something
similar being added in the future? At the least, it would be nice if
the special handling of the colon could be documented in the man page.

Actually, such an option would be as much a pain as it were convenient
if it could only be set globally. It would be great if yet another
shell option could be created that would allow the user to decree that
any shell options set or unset within a given function remain local to
that function. This would be the equivalent of 'setopt localoptions'
in zsh.

Regards,

Ian
-- 
Ian Macdonald               | Walking on water wasn't built in a day.  
ian@caliban.org             | -- Jack Kerouac 
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