[bombcar]

Doesn’t command completion cause a disk scan? Which can be a problem if the system is failing in some way and you’re trying to recover.

[jl6]

Can you not just avoid activating a completion attempt if you are in that scenario?

[forgotmypw17]

I think it is not as easy as you imply, especially if it is bound to muscle memory.

Side note: https://www.google.com/search?q=don%27t+say+just

[ed25519FUUU]

What percentage of your time do you spend on a shell on a host where the disk is failing and tabbing could cause a catastrophic disk read vs being on a perfectly healthy system where tab complete is a nice feature?

[bombcar]

What percentage of your time do you spend logged in as root? ;)

[Hello71]

unless you're exclusively running shell built-ins, doesn't running any command at all potentially cause a disk scan

[nyuszika7h]

Usually the shell creates a cache of commands on start, which can be refreshed with `hash -r`.

[yissp]

As far as I can tell the hash table is initially empty after you first start the shell. At least, that's the case for bash.

  $ hash
  hash: hash table empty

[xtracto]

Reminds me of the times I've had run out of space in a Linux system. When you SSH to the system and press TAB for command completion, all you get is some message regarding "the system running out of space".

[jmclnx]

Maybe in sh type shells. In csh/tcsh commands are hashed, so command completion is in memory. Thus the need for rehash.

There is a new setting in tcsh to allow for automatic rehash, but I have it disabled.

[mst]

hash -r in bash. No idea if there's a setting, I'm too used to doing the rehash as required to've noticed if there was.