[pacman-dev] [PATCH] bash_completion: remove absolute utility paths again

[Ray Kohler]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 4:56 PM, Cedric Staniewski <cedric at gmx.ca> wrote:
>> On 25.02.2010 23:43, Aaron Griffin wrote:
>>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Cedric Staniewski <cedric at gmx.ca> wrote:
>>>> The location of the used utilities may and does differ between various
>>>> distributions and therefore absolute paths do not work well. Since the
>>>> main purpose of its introduction was to avoid side-effects caused by
>>>> aliases, it is sufficient to disable possible aliases temporarily by
>>>> preceding the commands with a backslash.
>>>
>>> Holy crap, that works? Where did you find this trick?
>>
>> Seems so. I found it in a blog post[1] but not in bash's man page.
>>
>> [1] http://blog.zelut.org/2009/03/14/temporarily-disable-aliases-in-bash/
>
> This appears undocumented. I can't find any mention in the man page

I think this is one of the very old tricks that was first done in the
original csh, and picked up as "an obvious idea" by bash when it was
started. Nowadays, we've all forgotten about it, and it's become
mysterious.