Bash tab completion deletes text

Question

I have a debian system on which my bash tab completion has a weird behavior. When I write a command like scp file.tgz remoteServer:/home/remoteU and hit tab it will complete to scp file.tgz /home/remoteUser killing the host reference. This happens to me for any command ssh related command referencing a remote directory like this.

I already checked my bash completion configuration but couldn't find anything related to deleting test before a colon as this is the character I suspect to be causing the behavior. Also interresting enough the remote system will first be queried for the correct directory.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Add this line into your .bashrc to exclude the colon from the COMP_WORDBREAKS.

COMP_WORDBREAKS=${COMP_WORDBREAKS//:}

That's trimming according to this function in the source-code:

__ltrim_colon_completions()
{
    if [[ "$1" == *:* && "$COMP_WORDBREAKS" == *:* ]]; then
        # Remove colon-word prefix from COMPREPLY items
        local colon_word=${1%"${1##*:}"}
        local i=${#COMPREPLY[*]}
        while [[ $((--i)) -ge 0 ]]; do
            COMPREPLY[$i]=${COMPREPLY[$i]#"$colon_word"}
        done
    fi
}