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 $), username (if the text begins with ~), hostname (if
the text begins with @), or command (including aliases and functions)
in turn. If none of these produces a match, filename completion is
attempted.
I get the above described completion when a token starts with '~' or a letter. It's
just '$'-completion that's broken.
Best Answer
As of bash 4.2, this behavior is governed by
See http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-bash@gnu.org/msg11251.html for background information.