Arch Linux

mcloaked

Member

From: Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1,360

[SOLVED] rsync tab completion for remote path fails

Some days ago I noticed that when using tab completion for rsync the remote path would no longer do tab completion within a bash shell - so for example normally I might do something like:

rsync -av localserver:~/Doc and hit tab which then normally completes the Documents/ and so on. But nothing happened when I hit tab.

Yet if I typed the whole path myself, and then continued after the space with the local path - tab completion worked fine. I was really puzzled.

But on all my other machines the remote path (and local) tab completion worked with no problem at all - so I began to investigate, and asked myself did I have some oddball in the .local/share/ area or the .cache/ ? but I couldn't find anything.

Anyway after a lot of searching, including in the Arch forums, I eventually came to realise that only on that one machine did I have the package bash-completion installed.

So finally I did pacman -R bash-completion, and immediately rsync tab completion for remote (and local) paths works fine again - tab autocompletion always worked fine for everything else!  So I presume a recent update in the bash-completion package had a bug!

Anyway it is solved but thought I would mention it in case anyone else has that package installed and came across this same problem.

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Mike C