Re: Zsh autocompletion with no access to a parent directory

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Peter Stephenson
<p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> More from the world of "The Hairiest Shell Function in History, No,
> Really, I Mean, Like, Ever".

Yeah, I keep wondering if it's not way hairier than even necessary, as
a side-effect of having been evolved out of predecessors each of which
was slightly hairier than the one before.

> Well, the input is supposed to be unquoted in two stages.  Or something.
> I ran across this trying to complete [...]
> with accept-exact-dirs set.  That has the added interest over setting
> path-completion to false that you then need a completely unquoted string
> to test as a directory, and the added gotcha that if that doesn't work
> it just blithely carries on doing normal completion so it doesn't
> exercise the logic to put the directory onto the path immediately.

This jibes [*] with my recollection of previous forays into this
swamp, although I never made it as far as discovering that a second
differently-(un)quoted variant of the value in tmp1 was necessary to
press on to the next patch of firm ground.

[*] No, it does not "jive."

> Of course, with code this trivial it's hard to make a mistake.  Sob.

If it were all trivial we'd never have any fun.