i have an environment variable called tmp that has an absolute path to a directory in it (it's a temporary directory for me to throw things into whenever i please, for other machines on the network to see)

i have an environment variable called tmp that has an absolute path to a directory in it (it's a temporary directory for me to throw things into whenever i please, for other machines on the network to see)

inside the directory that it points at are a bunch of files, i'll choose tsduck-output.pcap completely arbitrarily for this example. i can do something like ls $tmp/tsduck-output.pcap and that works completely fine

i want tab completion to work with this environment variable, and it kind of does, but not quite

if i type in ls $tmp/ts and hit tab, the line completes to ls \$tmp/tsduck-output.pcap. so, bash does see that i'm accessing a path under that directory, and it does know to look under that directory to find what names to tab complete to. but also, for some reason, it thinks i want the literal dollar sign at the beginning, so it inserts the backslash and stops the path from working

is there some configuration thing i can do so it doesn't put the backslash before $tmp?

@monorail what shell are you using?

@steffo bash

@monorail

hmm, i'm not super familiar with bash

i tried to reproduce the behavior with $HOME but i didn't get a backslash added, so i couldn't test it myself

but maybe the direxpand shopt is what you're looking for?

https://man.archlinux.org/man/core/bash/bash.1.en#direxpand

@monorail ...do you have a directory named $tmp in your home?