Re: Zsh autocompletion with no access to a parent directory

[Yves Frederix <yves.frederix@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I have recently switched from bash to zsh and I am loving it. However,
there are still issues I didn't experience with bash. One of them is
the fact that tabcompletion was not able to cross unreadable parent
directories. With the solution proposed in this thread, this now works
more or less, but not completely... The problem seems to be related to
the use of ~user to access the homedirectory of 'user'.

A minimal example:
  testuser@dirac:~$ ls -ld Desktop/
  drwx--x--x 3 testuser testuser 4096 2010-06-25 09:33 Desktop/

  testuser@dirac:~$ ls -ld Desktop/work/
  drwxr-xr-x 2 testuser testuser 4096 2010-06-25 09:33 Desktop/work/

  testuser@dirac:~$ find Desktop/
  Desktop/
  Desktop/work
  Desktop/work/file2
  Desktop/work/file3
  Desktop/work/file4
  Desktop/work/file1

If I do (with accept-exact-dirs set to true):

  yves@dirac ~$ ls ~testuser/Desktop/work/<tab><tab>

nothing happens.

However, using the full path name:

  dirac ~$ ls /home/testuser/Desktop/work/<tab><tab>
  dirac ~$ ls /home/testuser/Desktop/work/file
  - files -
  file1  file2  file3  file4

So now it works. What could be going on here, and is there a way to
make the form with ~ work as well? Thanks!

Cheers,
YVES

On Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:33:15 -0700
Matt Wright <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The situation is this: At work we make fairly heavy use of network home
> directories. In one particular case some important scripts live in
> ~foo/bin, however, the actually home directory of ~foo is not
> accessible. This appears to give _path_files a big headache, as trying to
> type the following results in no completion suggestions.
>
> # ~foo/bin/<TAB>
>
> As far as I can tell from my attempts to parse the debugging output, it
> is attempting to traverse ~foo for path expansion? I was attempting to look
> for a way to disable path expansion (the /u/l/b -> /usr/local/bin stuff)
> while leaving normal filename suggestion intact. Either that, or a way to
> alter _path_files such that it doesn't die in this situation.

You can try telling completion to accept any directory that it knows exists
without trying to expand the path:

zstyle ':completion:*' accept-exact-dirs true

I'm not sure if this will help in the case you're describing, however,
since it looks like it might not be able to tell if the directory exists.
You'll need zsh 4.3.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>            Software Engineer
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