[Bug 1004225] Re: dramatic combination of apt-get and bash completion

[Peter Cordes]

I always scroll pages of completion results with space, not enter.  I
didn't know enter was an option there.  I just tried it, looks like
enter goes by lines, instead of pages?  No wonder you were holding it
down.  So... don't do that.  esp. not on sudo.

 To easily get a big list that you need to page, do
d[TAB]
There are a lot of commands that start with d, so you will get a nice big list.  Or for an even bigger list:
nice [TAB]  => all the commands

(the bash option to not tab-complete all the commands on an empty line
defaults to on, in Trusty at least, so that's why you need nice or sudo
or some other meta-command to trigger it.)

 I don't think there's any point leaving the bug report open, so marking
it invalid.

 I hope you were able to ^c your apt-get before much harm was done.
There should be logs somewhere in /var/log/apt/history of what got un-
installed.  In case it's still relevant 2 years on...


** Changed in: bash-completion (Ubuntu)
       Status: Opinion => Invalid

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1004225

Title:
  dramatic combination of apt-get and bash completion

Status in bash-completion package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  I don't know what to blame between apt-get, bash completion and
  myself… I'm reporting this as a bug but it can also be seen as an open
  question.

  I wanted to install a python related package but was missing the exact
  name when I was about to type it, thus I tried completion to list the
  names of python packages:

  sudo apt-get install python-[tab]

  which nicely produces the list of python-* packages
  scrolling the list a bit too far (using [enter]) it launched the command:

  sudo apt-get install python-

  resulting in the removal of python and a few hundreds of other
  packages depending on python.

  I know it's mostly based on a human mistake (I should have thought
  about the package name before…), but the result is pretty dramatic and
  I wonder if something could be done to prevent this?

  Maybe scrolling in completion shouldn't use [enter] but arrows or
  [space]

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