Bug in zsh filename completion (bad one...)

Bug in zsh filename completion (bad one...)

[Arno Hahma]

Dear developers,

I found a pretty annoying bug in zsh-2.6-beta13, in its
filename completion. The first characters of all filenames are missing,
like this:

sol|21:02|>ls <press TAB or ctrl-d>

             amp-h.in     h_startups   local.m4     nfig.h.in    nfigure.in
ADME         angeLog      il           nctions      nfig.log     sc
STALL        artupFiles   installdirs  nfig.cache   nfig.status  stall-sh
TA-FAQ       c            kefile       nfig.guess   nfig.sub
amp-h        config.h     kefile.in    nfig.h       nfigure

This should be:

ChangeLog       Makefile        Util/           config.h.in     install-sh*
Doc/            Makefile.in     acconfig.h      config.log      mkinstalldirs*
Etc/            Misc/           aclocal.m4      config.status*  stamp-h
Functions/      README          config.cache    config.sub*     stamp-h.in
INSTALL         Src/            config.guess*   configure*      zsh_startups
META-FAQ        StartupFiles/   config.h        configure.in

The same behaviour appears in all filename completion, including the
use of wildcard characters. I.e. ls * will result the same erroneous
output.

The system is Solaris 2.4 on sparc, compiled with either gcc-2.7.2 or
SunPro 3.0.1. The compiler does not have any effect, i.e. the bug is
not there.

The zsh works just fine on Solaris 2.5x86 (Intel-Solaris), the above
bug does not show up at all. Consequently, the bug is likely to be in
the Solaris-libraries (which system call?). 

There is one difference in compiling zsh on the two above systems:
Solaris 2.4 requires linking of /usr/ucblib/libucb.a or .so to get the
routine "killpg". The Solaris 2.5 has the same routine in its
/usr/lib/libc.so, not libucb.a.  However, I don't think the bug is in
the "kill process group" call ;).

It would be nice, if there was a workaround to the problem other than
updating to Solaris 2.5 ;). Well, this is going to happen anyway, some
time, but until then...

Yours,

ArNO
    2

Re: Bug in zsh filename completion (bad one...)

[Mark Borges]

This info, from the FAQ located at the ZSH WWW page,

	http://www.mal.com/zsh/FAQ/

should help you out.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A3.On what machines will it run? 
[...]

     Note for Solaris 2.2 and 2.3: The UCB versions of the routines
     for reading directories are not usable (the struct definitions
     are incompatible with the ones assumed by zsh). The symptom of
     this is that globbed filenames in the compiled version of zsh
     will be missing the first two letters. To avoid this, make sure
     you compile zsh without any reference to /usr/ucblib in (e.g.)
     your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>> On Wed, 20 Mar 1996 21:10:13 +0200 (EET),
>> Arno Hahma(AH) wrote:
...
AH> I found a pretty annoying bug in zsh-2.6-beta13, in its filename
AH> completion. The first characters of all filenames are missing,
AH> like this:
...
AH> There is one difference in compiling zsh on the two above systems:
AH> Solaris 2.4 requires linking of /usr/ucblib/libucb.a or .so to get the

It shouldn't (I can verify it doesn't in Solaris-2.3 and Solaris-2.5;
if it does in Solaris-2.4, then perhaps there is a configure bug).

  -mb-