[SOLVED] (for 'tar' at least) How do I get the 'old' bash completion back?

rosyth · Post by **rosyth** » Tue Jan 12, 2021 12:36 pm

bash --version
GNU bash, version 5.0.17(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

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aptitude show bash-completion
Package: bash-completion                 
Version: 1:2.10-1ubuntu1
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Multi-Arch: foreign
Priority: standard
Section: shells
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Architecture: all
Uncompressed Size: 1,523 k
Provides: bash-completion:i386 (= 1:2.10-1ubuntu1)
Description: programmable completion for the bash shell
 bash completion extends bash's standard completion behavior to achieve complex
 command lines with just a few keystrokes.  This project was conceived to
 produce programmable completion routines for the most common Linux/UNIX
 commands, reducing the amount of typing sysadmins and programmers need to do on
 a daily basis.
Homepage: https://github.com/scop/bash-completion

I don't want to be an IT admin, I've got other things to waste my time on. So it frustrates me a bit when I end up spending an hour or more just to figure out why something that used to work pretty well now doesn't.

My problem here is with bash and tab completion.

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tar -z -tvf makbash: no match: --occurrence[=NUMBER]

Duh !!? hitting TAB after 'mak' gets this nonsense. It should expand to the file I want to look at, eg... manually typing

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tar -z -xvf make_boabab_run_as_root.tgz 
usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.gnome.baobab.policy

Instead of just expanding to all local file matches, tab completion seems to be a super bloated feature that does not even have the decency to fail gracefully.

I see 122037 lines of configuration files !!! in /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/* including >700 lines for tar.

Really? I don't remember a great clamour from desperate Linux users for a 'better' tab completion.

So ... rant over....
Question.
How do I get the simple tab completion back?
Is it simply uninstalling 'bash-completion' ? Or will that mess up everything?
I don't really need all the bells and whistles like argument expansion etc etc. But I do want it to work when I need it.
This isn't the first command that I've found it impossible to simply expand out to the file name I want.

UPDATE.... I give up, it's a complete waste of time trying to unravel the code spaghetti in the tar completion file. So here's my regression 'back to normal'

At the top of '/usr/share/bash-completion/completions/tar'
I've stuck in the following code lines,

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function _tar { :; }
complete -F _tar        -o dirnames tar
return

And I seem to be back to the good old days of linux.