Possible file completion bug when the path contains a backslash

Possible file completion bug when the path contains a backslash

[Drew Frank]

Hi zsh-workers,

Briefly, file completion is not working as expected when (1) the
file's path contains a backslash; and (2) I've run compinit. A small
test case that reproduces the problem is provided in my superuser post
(http://superuser.com/questions/531875/zsh-compinit-breaks-file-completion-when-there-is-a-backslash-in-the-path),
but I will repeat it here for convenience:

$ zsh -f
$ mkdir bad\\dir
$ touch bad\\dir/myfile
$ ls bad\\dir/[TAB]

At this point, the path is completed to "bad\\dir/myfile", which is
the behavior I expect. However:

$ autoload -U compinit
$ compinit
$ ls bad\\dir/[TAB]

After running compinit, the completion no longer works. I originally
thought this was "correct" behavior that I could change via some
setting, but someone on the IRC channel told me that they followed
these steps and could not reproduce the problem. They were using zsh
5.0.0-dev-0. I ran this example using both 5.0.2 and 4.3.10, and in
both cases completion failed after running compinit.

Any idea what's going on here? Is this, in fact, a bug?

Thanks,
Drew

Re: Possible file completion bug when the path contains a backslash

[Bart Schaefer]

On Jan 11, 11:22am, Drew Frank wrote:
}
} $ autoload -U compinit
} $ compinit
} $ ls bad\\dir/[TAB]
} 
} Any idea what's going on here? Is this, in fact, a bug?

It appears to be a bug in the (largely undocumented) compfiles builtin,
which generates a glob pattern of 'baddir*(-/)' for the directory in
question, which then does not match.  Special characters other than a
backslash appear to be handled correctly, at least in a few minimal
tests I tried.

Don't have time right now to try to trace this down (and frankly don't
care to venture into that part of the code if I don't have to ...).