Bash: falling back to file autocompletion if errors introduced by program autocompletion

At the Bash command line interface, there is the concept of programmable completion and regular file/directory completion. This means that when you press the <TAB>, the alternatives can be provided by a custom program or the filesystem hierarchy.

There is always the chance that a program may introduce undesirable behavior to your auto-completion, and if this is case, you can disable ALL program completion and just rely on the fallback file/directory choices with the command below.

shopt -u progcomp

If you need to see what script a program is using for auto-completion:

# show script used for autocomplete for specific program
complete -p <program>
# show autocomplete scripts for all programs
complete

REFERENCES

gnu.org, shopt command

gnu.org, programmable completion

stackoverflow.com, bash tab completion broken

unix.stackexchange, list of programs for autocompletion

stackexchange.com, shows modification of complete

NOTES

On Ubuntu, this script loads autocomplete for all services: /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion