Re: _expand_alias does not expand aliases that contain an "!"

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Aug 26,  9:50am, Jonathan H wrote:
}
} Aliases that contain an exclamation point are not correctly expanded
} by _expand_alias.

You've encountered a fairly generic problem with the completion system,
to wit, special characters like '!' must be quoted in some contexts,
but must not be in other contexts.  You'd find the same issue with an
alias containing an asterisk, question mark, etc.

The following makes this work more of the time in the specific case of
alias expansion, but introduces what might be described as the inverse
problem.  That is, after the patch below,

% gc\!

will expand with _expand_alias, because the backslash is incorrectly
removed prior to looking up the alias.  There's no compstate value or
the like to indicate that the original string on the line contained a
backslash that shouldn't be removed.  (Examining $words[CURRENT] may
be a way around this, I haven't worked that out.)

Incidentally:  Running "compinit" binds ^Xa to _expand_alias for you.


diff --git a/Completion/Base/Completer/_expand_alias b/Completion/Base/Completer/_expand_alias
index 8240e41..9064ce8 100644
--- a/Completion/Base/Completer/_expand_alias
+++ b/Completion/Base/Completer/_expand_alias
@@ -25,6 +25,8 @@ else
   pre=(_main_complete - aliases)
 fi
 
+[[ "$compstate[quoting]" = (single|double) ]] || word="${(Q)word}"
+
 zstyle -s ":completion:${curcontext}:" regular tmp || tmp=yes
 case $tmp in
 always) sel=r;;