I very much want minimal bash completion. Obviously I am trying to get a system to work that does not have (the fancier) bash-completion.rpm installed. But I am still getting pestered with completeion, so I went looking.

“Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing to add, but when there's nothing left to take away”. Or succinctly, less is more.

What is the complete.bash file even for? Statistically looking, there is a (measly) 5% source code comment ratio, but even those hold no water. _cdpath_ is documented as # Handle the CDPATH variable. Wow, really? How does it handle CDPATH? It does not say.

Why is function _completion_loader manually defined if absent? It does not say. Had to look at bash source code. That is some bash<4.1 level stuff that is over 10 years old. Coincides nicely with the requires >=4.2 comment at the start of the file. complete.bash with completely useless code, check!

How about function _rootpath_? sbin completion already works with sudo.rpm already. And function _man_? Also already covered by bash-completion.rpm. complete.bash consists of at least 17% completely.useless code, before even getting to bugs.

What is function _ls_ good for? Undocumented too. Does something with dollars. So let's test. mkdir '$asd'; touch '$asf'; ls $as<TAB><TAB>. Result with a unraped bash: $asd/ $asf. Result with complete.bash: \$asd/. Who cares about gdb, you broke an essential command, check!

complete.bash is an alias for complete.mess. If you want to keep this script, move it to a separate package called werners-uncanny-completion so the community can easily sidestep it. There is nothing more annoying than completion which suppresses objects that, in fact, exist.

Ever tried the ls test with standard bash-completion ... same problem:

ls $as<TAB><TAB>
ls ls \$asd/

the _completion_loader is described in the comand

 info bash 'Command Line Editing' 'Programmable Completion'

the CDPATH variable is described in the manual page of bash

       CDPATH The search path for the cd command.
            This is a colon-separated list of directories in
            which the shell looks for destination  directories
            specified  by the cd command.
            A sample value is ".:~:/usr".

Trying to remove it leads to

rm '$asd<TAB><TAB>
rm '$asd'bash: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `''
\$asd/

with standard fancy bash-completion ... in other words you can alwasy construct a trap over which programmable bash completion fails

cannot reproduce this single apostrophe-involving issue