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Full Discussion: TAB completion in cygwin
Special Forums UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers TAB completion in cygwin Post 302395533 by SilversleevesX on Tuesday 16th of February 2010 10:41:28 AM
Old 02-16-2010
Tab completion more than a little off in Cygwin anyway...

I've found there's a few quirks and foibles with tab completion in Cygwin, even without involving string-parsing commands like awk, grep or sed. There are occasions, unpredictable and often inexplicable, when it will or won't work, and there have been times when I've had it work in a four- or five hour long session, logged out or closed my rxvt, come back an hour later and couldn't get a single tab to complete, even though my command syntax and patterns were indistinguishable from the ones I used in that long session only hours before.

I guess these are among the final side-effects of Bill Gates walking out of that legendary meeting with the IBM brass, having told them he was going with Windows 98 as his flagship product instead of NT. When even the best-intentioned developers try to fit a Unix skin on something that's bound to resist "wearing" the "monkey suit" of unadulterated POSIX/ISO at every turn, funny things are bound to happen. Let's not forget what cygpath -unix does to a string that describes a Windows path: the first thing it adds is /cygdrive/. That, from where I sit, is not Unix, will never be Unix, and just shows how many concessions, end-runs and workarounds the Cygwin coders had to resort to to get XP and Vista to "wear" the aforenamed "monkey suit."

But back to the topic of the thread.

If you don't get any further with this, chalk it up to the idiosyncrasies of both Cygwin and Windows and find something else to do, is my advice.

BZT
PS: Sorry to insinuate my mini-rant in your thread.
 

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File::Spec::Cygwin(3pm) 				 Perl Programmers Reference Guide				   File::Spec::Cygwin(3pm)

NAME
File::Spec::Cygwin - methods for Cygwin file specs SYNOPSIS
require File::Spec::Cygwin; # Done internally by File::Spec if needed DESCRIPTION
See File::Spec and File::Spec::Unix. This package overrides the implementation of these methods, not the semantics. This module is still in beta. Cygwin-knowledgeable folks are invited to offer patches and suggestions. canonpath Any "" (backslashes) are converted to "/" (forward slashes), and then File::Spec::Unix canonpath() is called on the result. file_name_is_absolute True is returned if the file name begins with "drive_letter:", and if not, File::Spec::Unix file_name_is_absolute() is called. tmpdir (override) Returns a string representation of the first existing directory from the following list: $ENV{TMPDIR} /tmp $ENV{'TMP'} $ENV{'TEMP'} C:/temp Since Perl 5.8.0, if running under taint mode, and if the environment variables are tainted, they are not used. case_tolerant Override Unix. Cygwin case-tolerance depends on managed mount settings and as with MsWin32 on GetVolumeInformation() $ouFsFlags == FS_CASE_SENSITIVE, indicating the case significance when comparing file specifications. Default: 1 COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2004,2007 by the Perl 5 Porters. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. perl v5.16.2 2012-10-11 File::Spec::Cygwin(3pm)
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