Path always goes absolute when autocompleting if a dir has a space in its name

Question

I do the following with bash 5.0.17:

$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir 'A B'
$ touch 'A B/C.txt'
$ ls A\ B/C<TAB>

I want the last to autocomplete to ls A\ B/C.txt (relative), but it instead autocompletes to ls /tmp/A\ B/C.txt (absolute). Is there any way to make it autocomplete to a relative path?

This is for working with third-party software which hardcodes directory names including spaces, so simply not using spaces in directory names isn't an option.

Answer 1

It seems like this behaviour comes from having direxpand enabled. You probably have this in your bashrc:

shopt -s direxpand

You will need to remove that line or change it to shopt -u direxpand. Unfortunately, this means you lose the other benefits of direxpand (personally I have it enabled because I don't like $ being escaped by tab-completion).