Re: Strange bash complementation behavior

[Paul Jarc]

Erik Wasser <erik.wasser@iquer.net> wrote:
> % ls -dl perl projects projects/perl
> lrwxrwxrwx    1 fuzz users   13 Jan  9 00:21 perl -> projects/perl
> drwxrwxr-x   15 fuzz fuzz  4096 Jan 11 14:12 projects
> drwxr-xr-x  108 fuzz fuzz  8192 Jan 11 15:48 projects/perl
> % cd perl
> % ls ../proj<TAB>
>
> the complementation turns this into 'ls ../projects<SPACE>'. Why is 
> there a <SPACE> (instead of a '/')?

Since you are actually in the projects/perl directory, there is no
../projects, and ls will tell you that.  bash is warning you about
this here, in a way.  bash knows what path you used to reach this
directory, so it can pretend that ../projects exists, but that path
won't be meaningful to other programs, since they only see the current
state, and not your history.

> Where is the error? I think 'cd' is a shell builtin and interpretes the 
> '..' in a different way than the shell command 'ls'.

Yes.  cd is a builtin command, so it can take advantage of extra
information, which isn't available to ls.


paul