Re: *shell* TAB *Completions* fooled by $PWD/

[Kevin Rodgers]

Miles Bader wrote:

> In general, you can't rely on completion in shell-mode to know about the
> exact internal state of the shell process, since there's no way for
> emacs to figure that out (it tries to track the current directory, since
> that's very important, but even that can sometimes get messed up).  The
> value of the PWD environment variable in emacs is just whatever value it
> got at startup.


The shell.el directory tracking mechanism could be modified to update
the PWD environment variable as well as its internal variables.  But
unlike its internal variables, which can be local to the *shell* buffer,
the environment variable's value is shared via the global
process-environment Emacs variable.  (And we have to consider the case
when there's more than one *shell* buffer.)  But perhaps Shell mode could
make process-environment local to the *shell* buffer, so it would be free
to update PWD.
--
Kevin Rodgers <kevinr@ihs.com>