TAB autocomplete does not work correctly for "chown user:group"

[Christian González]

Binary package hint: bash-completion

bash-completion does not work correctly for chown.

try the following:
go into a dir as root, and type:

mkdir test
  $ ls -l
  insgesamt 4
  drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-08-05 19:10 test

now type
  $ chown ma[TAB]
it tries autocompletes and suggests:
  mail: man:

There are the colons, auto-completion does not delete them. Therefore, if you press another 'i' ->for 'mail' or just type
  $ chown mai[TAB]
it auto-completes to
  $ chown mail\:
with a trailing space - this is useless.

if you type
  $ chown mail:[TAB]
it shows the correct groups.

I think the autocomplete feature forgets to delete the trailing colon and interprets it as part of the user to search for.

[Christian González (droetker)]

I think problem is the file /etc/bash_completion.

at line 3236 it says:
   # remove any \: generated by a command that doesn't
   # default to filenames or dirnames (e.g. sudo chown)
   # FIXME: I'm pretty sure this does not work!

But it doesn't matter whether you say
chown or 'sudo chown' or 'sudo -s' and then chown.

Despite the FIXME I didn't find a bug report...

[Jignesh Borad (jigneshborad)]

I can confirm this behavior in interpid.

Although, I am not sure about the package. I think bash-completion returns proper mail: which is taken by bash and displayed as mail\: but I am not too sure.

[Juanma (juanma-bellon)]

Changing the binding of autocompletion function to command from this:
  complete -F _chown $filenames chown
to this:
  complete -F _chown -o nospace chown
avoids both the quotting of the colon and the adding of a trailing space added (both actions are performed by Bash's autocompletion features, so the package selection is probably right).

The relevant line is in /etc/bash_completion.

The problem of this solution is that it breaks the proper filename completion for 'chown'.