please do not expand leading tildes

I agree with this. bash handles it correctly for me without _expand, and __expand_tilde_by_ref. These functions don't have any regard for my expand-tilde option either, they blatantly _dis_regard it.

Was a fix for this ever released? I still find this behaviour in Lucid.

No, it wasn't. I still have the behavior in Maverick.

@Mike Doherty, Victor Zamanian: Just checked out bash_completion. If you use the master branch (dangerous?) it's fixed, but it's not fixed at the 1.2 tag. I was looking for the specific commit that fixed it, but I gave up.

git clone git://git.debian.org/git/bash-completion/bash-completion.git

Nobody seems to be prepping for a release yet, although the time between releases seems to be about 6-9 months, and it's been 6 months since 1.2. So it may be coming in the next several months. If you must have it, and you just want instructions, do the following:

git clone git://git.debian.org/git/bash-completion/bash-completion.git
cd bash-completion
git checkout master
sudo cp bash-completion /etc

Then add to your .bashrc, .profile, .bash_profile, whatever:

# Use bash-completion, if available
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
  . /etc/bash_completion
fi

For fun, notice the message attached to SHA 0c4db6eb969892ca282e7d5c8a524f2c062eb42e. That just made my day.

I take it back. It works with ls, cd, etc. But not with vi, vim, or emacs, and possibly others.

Looks like attached patch will work.

Ooops. Looks like fix like that will break different things:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/bash-completion-devel/2009-February/000973.html

Ok, that patch looks better.

Note, however, that the same change must be done in following files:
bash$ grep -rn " _expand" /etc/bash_completion.d/
/etc/bash_completion.d/info:11: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/lrzip:49: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/povray:12: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/man:21: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/xz:53: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/lzop:54: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/rsync:12: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/sshfs:11: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/bzip2:37: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/ssh:347: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/lzma:32: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/dd:25: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/gcc:19: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/findutils:70: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/dpkg:29: _expand || return 0
/etc/bash_completion.d/gzip:41: _expand || return 0

--- /etc/bash_completion.original 2012-08-14 23:08:38.189654426 +0400
+++ /etc/bash_completion 2012-08-23 01:12:13.313643700 +0400
@@ -1596,7 +1596,7 @@
     COMPREPLY=()
     _get_comp_words_by_ref cur

- _expand || return 0
+ _rl_enabled expand-tilde && (_expand || return 0)

     # get first exclusion compspec that matches this command
     xspec=$( awk "/^complete[ \t]+.*[ \t]${1##*/}([ \t]|\$)/ { print \$0; exit }" \

Fixed for completions that use _filedir_xspec in 'master' branch on git://anonscm.debian.org/bash-completion/bash-completion.git
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=bash-completion/bash-completion.git;a=commit;h=fdb080ff89195f85e1b76d0752979dfefa777595