intent of tab-completion in /bin/sh in 9.0

[Jilles Tjoelker]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 08:46:18PM -0500, Matthew Story wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Jilles Tjoelker <jilles at stack.nl> wrote:
> > POSIX itself has gradually adopted ksh features, so seeing more of them
> > in future is not unlikely. Most of the new language features in 9.0 are
> > either from POSIX.1-2008 or on the roadmap for a new version of POSIX
> > (in collaboration with other shell authors).

> Tab completion is a welcome addition, I was unaware that this had been (or
> is slated to be) added to the POSIX specification.  This makes far more
> sense than my proposed explanations.  Thanks for the clarification.

Tab completion is not in POSIX and not planned to be (as far as I know),
although there is some fairly ugly pathname completion functionality
required in 'set -o vi' mode (we do not implement it).

The reason is more like that I noticed that NetBSD had it and found
someone willing to port it and add some small features (escaping special
characters in what is inserted).

In using /bin/sh as login shell on virtual machines (to avoid the need
to install something else from ports), I have found the filename
completion to be remarkably useful.

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker