help with bash tab completion behavior

[Derek Broughton]

Art Alexion wrote:

> On Friday 21 July 2006 11:51, Christopher J. Bottaro wrote:

>> Assume a file dir1/dir2/file1 that I want to commit in cvs.
>> 'cvs commit di<tab>' results in 'cvs commit dir1 '.  Notice the trailing
>> space.  That is completely useless, because now I have to backspace and
>> manually type a slash to be able to continue tab completing to my target
>> file.

I'd hesitate to call that "completely useless" - I simply wouldn't try that
a second time. :-)  If I wanted 'directory1', the 'di<tab><backspace>' is
worthwhile anyway. 
> 
> I don't know if this is a Dapper bug or just a bad installation.  Works as
> expected for me.

I think it is a bug - this sort of behaviour began for me somewhere in
dapper.  It's particularly noticeable if I do something like 
 "sudo ls /someprotecteddir<tab>"
If I (personally) have read access to the directory, it usually works (but
I'm not convinced it _always_ works) but, if I don't, it always adds the
space at the end.  I can understand that it can't help me with completions
beyond this point, as the bash completion is working under my ID but the
resulting command is going to run under root, but it _does_ seem to know
it's a directory at least, so shouldn't just add a space.
-- 
derek