Bash completion not working with symlink tree

Question

Let's say that I have this tree architecture:

~/user
|_____ dir0
|_____ symlink0
|      |_______ somefile0
|_____ symlink1
       |_______ somefile1
       |_______ somefile2

If I'm doing this:

cd
cd symlink0/
cd ../[tab][tab]

I expect it to display the content of ~/user:

dir0 symlink0 symlink1

So I can do something like:

cd ../symlink1/

But instead it is auto-completing directly to...

cd ../dir0/

... with only one [tab] key press.

Any suggestion? Thanks!

EDIT: on another computer it does not autocomplete at all, even with a 'real' directory as in my above example. In the case of multiple directories it is either not autocompleting at all (no proposition of possible directories) or just autocompleting to the first directory, depending on the machine used.

Note that this happens only when trying to reach directories that are above in the tree structure (e.g. cd ./path/to/sym # press [tab][tab] will output symlink0 symlink1 to choose from if ./path/to contains two symlinks.)

Answer 1

The reason is that for the shell, a symlink is a priori only a file, and the fact that it points to a directory is only apparent by inspecting its contents and recognizing that the target is, indeed, a directory. You may have noticed that when starting to type the name of a symlink that points to a directory, the trailing '/' only appears if you press TAB twice.

Since in the setting you presented, there is one actual directory, the autocomplete of cd, which obviously expects a directory as argument, is greedy and takes that one instead of waiting for the interpretation of the symlinks.

You may be able to overcome this behaviour by following advice in this post.