disable autocomplete of the home path ( possible clues)

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:29:27 +0100
Carsten Aulbert <carsten at welcomes-you.com> wrote:

> Rares Vernica wrote:
> > In Bash, when I type something like "~/" and I press TAB, the "~" is 
> > replaced with the path to my home (e.g. "/home/username"). I would like 
> > to turn this feature off. Is it possible?
> 
> That is a yes
> 
> > I don't want to turn off the other auto-completion features, like 
> > directory and file names auto-completion, just the "~" replacement.
> 
> That's the harder part. My guess is, it belongs to the readline interface
> Thus putting 'set tilde-expand Off' in ~/.incputrc *should* alter that,
> according to 'man bash' or 'man readline', however, I didn't succeed.
> 
> Maybe you should search in that direction.

OK - I did a bit of comparison with a Debian Sid chroot I have running
here, and discovered the following:

1: Debian does not complete the tilde on ~/ <tab> ( for instance  cd ~/deb
<tab> does not expand to /home/peter/debs but remains ~/debs )

2. Debian sets the PATH in /etc/profile and does not
source /etc/bash.bashrc from /etc/profile

3. Apparently Ubuntu uses /etc/environment to set the PATH

4. If the following is commented out in /etc/profile on Ubuntu, it behaves
like Debian ( no tilde expansion)

#    if [ -f /etc/bash.bashrc ]; then
#	. /etc/bash.bashrc
#    fi

This appears not to affect the PATH , which is set for users
in /etc/environment in Ubuntu for reasons which remain triumphantly
unclear to me ;-) Something to do with pam ??

Commenting those lines in /etc/profile might break other things in new and
entertaining ways of which I am unaware ;-) , but this seems to be at
least a clue.

 /etc/bash.bashrc has a function which is *supposed* to
enable tilde expansion, but commenting that function out had no apparent
effect here.

Peter