Making bash autocompletion work

Question

I have a newly-reimaged VPS server. Bash tab completion and history (via the arrow keys) works as expected on the root account but is totally absent on my lower-privileged account. I also can't navigate within a command I enter to fix typos by using the arrow keys - I just get something like ^[[D at the terminal instead. My .bashrc is

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
if ! shopt -oq posix; then
  if [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
    . /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion
  elif [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . /etc/bash_completion
  fi
fi

Any thoughts on how to fix this problem? Thank you!

Answer 1

Going by your description, none of bash's command line edition features work. I'm with muru: the most likely explanation is that you are not, in fact, running bash, but some different shell such as dash. Keep in mind that /bin/sh is not bash — some distributions install bash as /bin/sh, but Ubuntu doesn't.

Check what your login shell is:

getent passwd $USER

If the line ends with :/bin/bash, your login shell is bash. If it ends with :/bin/sh, your login shell is dash, which is a shell intended for scripting, not for interactive use.

Run chsh -s /bin/bash to change your login shell to bash. Before logging out, make sure verify that you can still log in on another terminal.