Piotr Jaroszyński <pe...@gentoo.org> posted d77765540906031651q55f93c07t78beb1191f3bf...@mail.gmail.com, excerpted below, on Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:51:01 +0200:
> Where/when does :: need escaping? I'm not sure about this particular usage case as I haven't quite wrapped my mind around how to test it without it actually being at least stubbed into portage to test (not that I've spent too long trying, but given your question, a few seconds contemplation lead me to the conclusion that there was more to it than I might have than I thought), but bash completion at lest wants escaped colons in paths (and tab-completes them escaped with \), for instance, and shell scripts often use colons as field separators for filenames or paths as well, due to the relatively low frequency of use. It was the shell path stuff that I was thinking about when I cautioned about escapes. Maybe that doesn't apply in usage such as users would be using with portage? To confirm the above shell (well, shell completion) issues, I just created a dir ~/::test. Trying to tab-complete just a single colon produced unexpected results (either a listing of the entire parent dir, or :\:\:test, an extra colon, which naturally then failed to work as :::test didn't exist, depending on what I was tab-completing), while tab-completing a backslash escaped colon produced the desired results. Similar results if I tried to tab-complete a double-colon. When I tried to remove the ::test dir. rm -ri ::<tab> resulted in a completion of ::::test/, which of course gave me an error saying it couldn't find ::::test, but rm -ri \:<tab> completed correctly, and the rm succeeded. A retest typing in the entire name, ::test (thus NOT using tab- completion), however, worked correctly, so perhaps it's more accurate to say it's a bash-completion bug, while the shell itself works fine. Given that, we'd probably be OK at least until the gentoo-bashcomp update, and perhaps it could be worked around there. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
