Re: Tab completion misbehaves with newlines

[Chet Ramey]

On 7/15/15 12:44 PM, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> writes:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> You are inserting an unquoted whitespace, which ends the current word.
> The only bug is that readline doesn't perform command completion on the
> new line.

It performs filename completion, and that's not a bug.

Readline understands that \n is one of the characters that separates words
for the purposes of completion, so it passes "" as the word to be
completed.  Bash, which is what performs the command completion, is smart
enough to know that even though it follows a newline, the current word is
not in a command position, and defaults to filename completion.

Chet
-- 
``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/