[conspire] curious behavior of bash completion when there's a character that needs to be escaped e.g. $

[Peter Knaggs]

Hmm, if I first run this command, the bash completion works as I'd expect
in Debian 10, I guess I'll have to look into what this command does. :)

shopt -u progcomp

https://askubuntu.com/questions/70750/how-to-get-bash-to-stop-escaping-during-tab-completion

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 11:24 AM Peter Knaggs <peter.knaggs at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm having this curious behavior of bash completion
> on Debian 10 (buster) when I'm using environment variables in the command.
> A simple example is, let's say I have the following file on my filesystem
> (reading about CVE-2020-0601):
>
> $HOME/Downloads/CSA-WINDOWS-10-CRYPT-LIB-20190114.PDF
>
> and I type in the following command:
>
> cp $HOME/Downloads/CSA
>
> and then I press the [TAB] key followed by the [spacebar] key followed by
> the [.] key, what happens is that bash completion mistakenly changes the
> command to:
>
> cp \$HOME/Downloads/CSA-WINDOWS-10-CRYPT-LIB-20190114.PDF .
>
> When I press [Enter] key, I obviously get this error:
>
> cp \$HOME/Downloads/CSA-WINDOWS-10-CRYPT-LIB-20190114.PDF  .
> cp: cannot stat '$HOME/Downloads/CSA-WINDOWS-10-CRYPT-LIB-20190114.PDF':
> No such file or directory
>
> I don't think it should be escaping the $ in this scenario ($HOME is an
> environment variable, after all). I guess bash is thinking that the $ is
> "part of the filename" so it's escaping it, but I want bash to think of
> this $ as a real $ because it's in front of the name of the environment
> variable, so it shouldn't be escaped in this case. Does bash need a code
> change to support this kind of thing, or is there a feature I'm missing? I
> think some distros don't have this issue, but I wasn't paying close enough
> attention to remember whether I just worked around the issue using "~"
> instead of $HOME, e.g.:
>
> cp ~/Downloads/CSA
>
> and pressing [TAB] key followed by the [spacebar] key followed by the [.]
> key works fine:
>
> cp ~/Downloads/CSA-WINDOWS-10-CRYPT-LIB-20190114.PDF .
>
> But it'd be nice to be able to use environment variables...
>
> Thanks,
> Peter.
>
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