On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 03:53:38PM -0500, Arnaud Bergeron wrote:
> I noticed that, using ksh, if you try to tab-complete any filename
> that has a '[' in it while there are more than one file in the
> directory will fail. Simple example:
[...]
> So this leads to my question. Is it a design feature, a POSIX
> requierment, or simply something that has gone unnoticed?
ksh would need some kind of incremental parser for both parsing
scripts as well for doing tab-completion. Unfortunately, using a
common parser for normal use (parse a script) and for special
interactive use (completion) isn't trivial. The edit implementations
(both emacs and vi) use lots of ad-hoc stuff.
I'd the idea of using a common parser implemented with yacc(1), but
Otto pointed out that this wouldn't help much but also bloat ksh.
So, for now, completion won't work for some pathological cases ('{',
'@', and other unusual characters).
Fixing this would be more than one or two days of work. But have a
look at at&t ksh -- it even sucks more if it comes to completion.
Ciao,
Kili
