accept-exact and current directory

accept-exact and current directory

[Jesper Nygårds]

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I use menu completion, and a while ago I found the accept-exact zstyle:

zstyle ':completion:*' accept-exact true

This works very well for me, as I find I often write the whole of a (short)
word, and then on reflex hit <tab> without really intending to do so.
Without the "accept-exact" zstyle, I often change what I wanted to write.

However, I recently discovered a problem with this. Suppose I want to
complete on some hidden file (i.e. beginning with a dot) in my home
directory. I write:

ls ~/.<tab>

Now, since accept-exact is active, zsh assumes that I mean '.' for current
directory, and completes with:

ls ~/./

since '.' is a directory. After that I have to manually remove the trailing
slash, and try to remember the first letter in the file I'm looking for.

Is there some way to specify that I never want '.' to match, as in the path
above and similar cases? I can't see a case where I would ever want to
write "/somepath/./" . Without a way to exclude '.', I guess I'll have to
stop using accept-exact.

Re: accept-exact and current directory

[Bart Schaefer]

On Sep 13,  8:12pm, Jesper Nygards wrote:
}
} zstyle ':completion:*' accept-exact true
} 
} ls ~/.<tab>
} 
} Now, since accept-exact is active, zsh assumes that I mean '.' for current
} directory, and completes with:
} 
} ls ~/./
} 
} Is there some way to specify that I never want '.' to match, as in the path
} above and similar cases?

The doc for accept-exact says:

     When completing pathnames (where the tag used is `paths') this
     style accepts any number of patterns as the value in addition to
     the boolean values.  Pathnames matching one of these patterns will
     be accepted immediately even if the command line contains some
     more partially typed pathname components and these match no file
     under the directory accepted.

The part about "... even if ... these match no file" is a little confusing,
and in fact I can't come up with a case where it applies.  Maybe PWS or
Oliver can disentangle Sven's non-native English here.  Anyway, the point
is to come up with patterns that don't match a trailing dot:

    zstyle ':completion:*:paths' accept-exact '[^.]' '^(*/.)'

(remember these are string-match patterns, not globs, although they
share syntax, and that completion always uses extendedglob, so ^(*/.)
to strings not matching */.)