Bug 177250

Summary:	Bash completion mishandles colon characters
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	JW <ohtmvyyn>
Component:	bash	Assignee:	Tim Waugh <twaugh>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Ben Levenson <benl>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2006-01-09 09:10:01 UTC	Type:	---
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Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description JW 2006-01-08 08:15:00 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows; U; AIIEEEE!; Win98; Windows 98; en-US; Gecko masquerading as IE; should it matter?; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050217

Description of problem:
For some reason bash treats a colon in a filename in a different way to other charcters, even though it is neither a glob'able, directory separator, or in any other way a special character (except in certain contexts such as variable expansion etc).


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
bash-3.0-31

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. cd /some-directory-containing-many-files
2. touch a:b
3. ls a:<TAB> OR ls a:<CTRL-D>


Actual Results:  Display all 654 possibilities? (y or n)


Expected Results:  Display all 1 possibilities? (y or n)



Additional info:

You must have filename-completion enabled in bash (see your ~/.inputrc or /etc/inputrc).

Comment 1 Tim Waugh 2006-01-08 10:58:15 UTC

This behaviour is intentional, for convenience when setting PATH-like variables.

Comment 2 Tim Waugh 2006-01-08 10:58:48 UTC

(Of course, you can escape it: ls a\:<TAB>)

Comment 3 JW 2006-01-08 13:01:57 UTC

How strange ... "... for convenience when setting PATH-like variables".
Let's think this through carefully.
There you are, at a shell prompt, setting your PATH, using filename-completion.

I wonder how often people do that, compared to the number of times a filename
has a colon in it! LOL!

Comment 4 Tim Waugh 2006-01-09 09:10:01 UTC

This is intentional behaviour.