Dear bash help list members. I'm in serious need of help;). My problem deals with bash auto completion and the fact that it seems to be a little random in addition to the fact that I run my own distro, makes it a little hard to explain, as well, so bear with me.
Basically, I've been building and running my own distro, based on a LFS core for many many years, without problems that were too hard to fix. Now I've stumped into a problem that nobody seems to have seen before and I'm really stuck how to proceed. Right now, I'm building LFS-6.4, which includes bash-3.2: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/ This shouldn't really matter for you and you probably don't need to know much about it, to help me debug my problem. The problem is that sometimes bash auto completion works and sometimes it doesn't. I'm seeing the same problem with bash-3.2 and bash-4.0 when installing the new system, but my previous LFS system, from 2006, which also has bash-3.2.39, doesn't have this problem. F.ex: If I do tar -zxf file-4.26.tar.gz ..then I have one file and one directory named: file-4.26.tar.gz file-4.26/ If I try to cd into this directory: cd file TAB ..it auto completes the filename. It doesn't even see the directory. If I do: cd file* TAB ..it lists both the directory and the file, but if I want to enter the directory, I have to write the complete directory and hit enter. It's really, really weird and it doesn't always happen, just with some files/directories. I can unpack 10 files and cd into them with no problem, then suddenly I hit one that doesn't auto complete. I've used bash for 10 years and I do know what to expect. I've made sure I don't have any programmable completions: complete -r ..so "complete" returns nothing This is the output of ''bind -v'' set bind-tty-special-chars on set blink-matching-paren on set byte-oriented off set completion-ignore-case off set convert-meta off set disable-completion off set enable-keypad off set expand-tilde off set history-preserve-point off set horizontal-scroll-mode off set input-meta on set mark-directories on set mark-modified-lines off set mark-symlinked-directories off set match-hidden-files on set meta-flag on set output-meta on set page-completions on set prefer-visible-bell on set print-completions-horizontally off set revert-all-at-newline off set show-all-if-ambiguous off set show-all-if-unmodified off set visible-stats off set bell-style none set comment-begin # set completion-prefix-display-length 0 set completion-query-items 100 set editing-mode emacs set history-size 500 set keymap emacs This is very frustrating, cause it makes it impossible to work with. It's worth mentioning that I'm seeing this in a chroot environment (chapter 6), so it really can't be some kind of kernel problem, cause my system works as it always has done. Highly unlikely any other packages I've installed from that LFS book, like libc, cause this 6.4 version is many months old and I've asked the LFS mailing list, but no one has seen this issue before. I don't expect any of you to familiarize yourself with LFS. I only need some help how to approach debugging this problem. I've attached strace to the running bash process, but don't really know what to look for. Of course, the next thing I will try, is to build the LFS core from another system, cause maybe some files from my system has polluted the LFS core build, somehow, even though this should be impossible when looking at the LFS build procedure. Any pointers that can help me debug this problem?. -- Esben Stien is b...@e s a http://www. s t n m irc://irc. b - i . e/%23contact sip:b0ef@ e e jid:b0ef@ n n
