From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012 Description of problem: Not sure if it is a setup issue or what, but it used to be (RH 7.1 and earlier) that you could hit escape in a terminal shell if you were typing a program or filename adn it woudl autocomplete it for you. This does not happen anymore. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.install RH 7.2 2.cd /ho 3.hit the escape key 4. It does nothing and in 7.1 it used to complete the word and make it home. Additional info:
This feature is called "tab completion" because it's activated by pressing the tab key, not escape. ;) If escape worked for you, that was some local re-mapping of keys; the only completion we even supported officially is cd /ho[tab].
What did redhat change then in the mapping of the keys and how do I undo what you did. Escape has worked for me on Sun, HP, AIX and up until RH 7.2 Linux as well. What do I need to do to change this mapping?
We did not change this mapping, it has always been tab.
I was using 2.4.14 with Redhat 7.1 and now I am using 2.4.14 with Redhat 7.2. Why would I need to compile my kernel?
I think you are missing the point. It worked before and it should work now, and the only change was from RH 7.1 to RH 7.2. There has to be something that changed in 7.2 that effects the escape key. What is it and how do I undo it?
I'm re-opening this because I can reproduce this. It takes me two escape-keys to get the same behavior as one tab-key with a 7.1 system w/ bash. Sure enough, I try the same thing on the 7.2 system, and voila! The escape key feature NO LONGER WORKS. Maybe it's still not a bug, but the user has a basis for this report. I'd recommend to the user to think about using the tab-key anyway, since it's faster... and I have been told (but not verified) that the other UNIXen mentioned are supposed to use tab-completion the same way as Linux does. User DOES have a point, and a reproducible one, at that.
I've been doing some research on this and it seems that this may be a korn shell feature that made its way into bash? I use bash on Linux always and this was there. Taken from http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/unixhelp/shell/cmd1.3.html Filename completion with the Korn shell Filename completion is only available if the the environment variables EDITOR and/or VISUAL are set to either emacs, gmacs or vi. For example: EDITOR=emacs The value of the VISUAL variable takes precedence over the value of the EDITOR variable. emacs- or gmacs-style file completion To complete a file or directory name with emacs or gmacs set press the ESC key twice. ls -l on<ESC><ESC>line_help If the filename is not completed enter more characters until the filename can be uniquely identified. Directories are shown by the trailing / character.
Some more research turn up that it may be the inputrc used by bash. Has this changed? What was it in 7.1 and what is it in 7.2?
It seems that adding the following to any users inputrc fixes the issue. "\e\e": complete This also does NOT break the tab completion.
We have never mapped escape like this in any previous release, to my knowledge.