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I am new to urxvt (moved from gnome-terminal -> Ubuntu 12.04 refugee). I am used to having environment variables expand in gnome-terminal by default

Suppose that I have an environment variable "FOO_PATH" set up for "/home/foo/".

When I type $FOO_PATH/ , I do not get an expansion and/or a listing of items in $FOO_PATH.

How do I achieve this in {u}rxvt ? Thanks for your attention.


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up vote 1 down vote accepted

What you describe sounds like a shell issue, and nothing that has to do with Urxvt/Gnome Terminal. Probably Bash is used in both cases - perhaps you are missing the bash-completion package or an equivalent in your current setup (it seems like you have left Ubuntu, but you don't say what you use now, so I can't give more specific tips). Try installing that.

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I have not left Ubuntu. I moved from GNOME to XFCE. I think you are right about $bash-completion$. I am not the admin and it seems to be the result of a botched upgrade from 10.04->12.04. Thanks. –  boffin Jun 8 '12 at 13:14
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This is about direxpand option. $ shopt -s direxpand and $FOO_PATH/ will be expanded by TAB.

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