In bash-4.3-beta2 a new feature has been introduced under 2. a. Changed message when an incremental search fails to include "failed" in the prompt and display the entire search string instead of just the last matching portion.
But there's another side effect to this: the string matching the characters typed first is returned, although failed is printed. I understand the good intent of this feature, but coming from bash 4.2, I find it quite disturbing, as it's provoking errors if one doesn't check, if reverse search has succeeded or failed (e.g. for a long string) and just presses enter. While this has not happened to me yet, I found the previous behaviour very comfortable and safe. If no matching results are present I don't think its a good idea to print 'failed' and just return the next best match. (Not very realistic) example search for "longcommand remember-the-milk" and a typo: "[Ctrl-r] remember-the-milk" may return "rm somefiles". One has to look carefully look if the search has failed otherwise, which many people don't do, especially if they're using to the previous behaviour. I didn't find a way to turn this feature of and get the old behaviour. Is it possible to at least make it optional in the next release that the next best match is returned? I think most people will notice it just now as it found its way into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS released in two weeks, so it will probably stay for a while. Best regards Thomas
