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I've long set my most-recently visited directories to shell variables d1, d2, etc.

On an ancient Fedora machine I could type a command like

$ cp $d1/

and the shell would replace $d1 with text like /home/acctname/projects/blog/ and would then show me the contents of .../blog, like you would expect any tab-completion to do.

Now, both ubuntu wheezy/sid and fedora 16 just \-escape the '$', and naturally there are no completions to show.

You can see this behavior in action in an OSX Terminal window. On 10.8, do something like

ls $HOME/ to see what I mean.

Is there a bash shell variable or option that can restore the old behavior?

man bash suggests this is a bug:

   complete (TAB)
          Attempt  to  perform  completion  on  the  text  before  point.  Bash
          attempts completion treating the text as  a  variable  (if  the  text
          begins  with  $),  username (if the text begins with ~), hostname (if
          the text begins with @), or command (including aliases and functions)
          in  turn.   If none of these produces a match, filename completion is

I get the above described completion when a token starts with '~' or a letter. It's just '$'-completion that's broken.

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1 Answer 1

As of bash 4.2, this behavior is governed by

shopt -s direxpand # enable
shopt -u direxpand # disable

See http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-bash@gnu.org/msg11251.html for background information.

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I really wanted to check this off, but I got this result: ericp@pacer:apps $ shopt -s direxpand bash: shopt: direxpand: invalid shell option name ericp@pacer:client $ bash --version GNU bash, version 4.2.24(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) ericp@pacer:client $ echo $BASHOPTS checkwinsize:cmdhist:expand_aliases:extglob:extquote: force_fignore:histappend:interactive_comments:progcomp: promptvars:sourcepath This is on Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS –  Eric Oct 26 '12 at 16:16
How do I add newlines in stackexchange comments? –  Eric Oct 26 '12 at 16:16

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