Saturday, August 6, 2011

Tab Completion Bug in Mint 11

This is really a tab completion bug in Ubuntu 11.04 - and may actually be a pair of bugs (I'm not sure), one not the fault of Ubuntu.  Details can be found in this bug report. The short form is that command line tab completion (where you start typing a path and hit TAB to complete it) started breaking down on one of my Mint machines. Hitting TAB would add an unwanted space at the end of the path (forcing me to backspace if I were not yet done) and also failed to escape spaces.  In fact, if I typed the portion of the path containing the space and escaped it, then hit TAB, the escape character (backslash) would be removed.

The bug report contains two possible fixes. As it happens, I had started out with Acrobat Reader 9 installed from the repository on this machine, then replaced it with the version downloaded from Adobe's web site.  This is my 64 bit box, and there's an issue with Acrobat Reader looking for 32 bit versions of libraries (which I have installed), finding the 64 bit versions instead, and tripping over them.  I thought maybe using the Adobe version would fix the problem.  (It did not.)

At any rate, I tried one of the two suggestions in the bug report: deleting /etc/bash_
completion.d/acroread.sh (which is a symlink to a script that comes with the Adobe version of Reader). That seems to have fixed the tab completion bug (knock on virtual wood). It does not seem to have done any harm to Reader, either.

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