Preventing bash tab completion of an environment variable with a FS path value from removing the environment variable name

Friends,

I am using GNU bash as my shell on Linux:

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.2.45(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
$ 

It acts very strangely when I am setting an environment variable with a FS path as its value.

Say I want to add /opt/database/bin to the front of PATH.

I start by typing in:

$ export PATH=/o

Then I press the tab key on my keyboard.

But instead of completing the path to /opt, it deletes the PATH= part! Instead, I get:

$ export /opt/

That is, of course, extremely useless to me and very aggravating! I am then required to add in the environment variable name manually, which is not at all what I wish to be doing!

I wanted it to complete it to this:

$ export PATH=/opt/

Then I can complete the rest of the path using minimal typing and the tab key.

Is there any way that I can get it to not delete the environment variable, and to act in a sensible way that helps make me productive to the max?

Solution 1:

Try disabling Bash-Completion.

Your PATH completion works for me, however, on systems using Bash-Completion. You might try un-installing and re-installing it to see if it works. I find the functionality it provides too useful to give up.

Solution 2:

disabling Bash-Completion altogether has probably been an overkill. It is a very useful and productive feature.

The breakage such as you describe is usually caused by specific bash completion configuration scripts that lie in /etc/bash_completion.d/, installed by third party .deb packages.

I had the exact same problem on Ubuntu, and in my case the culprit turned out to be the /etc/bash_completion.d/npm script installed by the npm Debian package (containing the package manager for Node.js).

I've just moved the npm script out of /etc/bash_completion.d/ - problem solved, and useful Bash Completion functionality preserved.