Linux Tips: bash completion: /dev/fd/62: No such file or directory

This post will show how to deal with the issue I had on a newly installed debian lenny xen virtual machine. I used xen-tools to create the vm using the deboostrap method, and all was fine. I installed the bash-completion package, as probably most of you, I can’t live without bash completion, but quickly found out that it was broken. Any attempt to perform a filelist completion was failing with this error:
vm11:~# tail -f /va<TAB>-bash: /dev/fd/62: No such file or directory
-bash: /dev/fd/60: No such file or directory

and this basically makes the bash completion useless. On a quick look I could easily see that the /dev/fd link was not there and that was the main cause of the problem. Still on one older lenny vm I had for a couple of months this was not happening (from what I can tell because it had an older version of the /etc/bash_completion file). There are several ways to fix this starting with the obvious one to downgrade /etc/bash_completion but I didn’t like that, so I looked for some other ways. Read the rest of this entry »

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