Re: tab completion is sluggish

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Sat 26 Nov 2022 at 14:00:39 (+0100), email.lists81@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> Doing tab completion in my user account is quite sluggish, it takes
> about half a second before anything happens after pressing tab.
> 
> I've done an strace on the shell and it turns out that when I press
> tab bash does a select() on stdout that times out after half a second.
> When I'm logged in as root and do the same thing bash does not do
> that, so I presume it has something to do with how tab completion is
> configured when I'm logged in to my regular user account. I'm not sure
> how to investigate this further, any help would be appreciated. I'm
> still on debian 10 and my version of bash is 5.0.3(1)

Do you have a networked filesystem in your PATH? Or a directory on
a slow device, like a stick or caddy? Remember to check symlinks.

It might also help to know whether:

. you've installed the package bash-completion,

. you have   [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && . /etc/bash_completion
  in your startup files,

. root has ditto.

Cheers,
David.