Blog - /Tech

Making annoying Emacs find-file completions go away

I had a guest over who ssh'd into a machine named similarly to one of my top-level directories. This caused M-x find-file to show his machine every time I tried to tab-complete on that directory. Very annoying. It turns out that tramp is to blame: it reads ~/.ssh/known-hosts every time find-file is run. To make that bad completion go away, just remove all mentions of the machine name from ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

[ category: tech | permalink | comments (2) ]

Posted by Eric H at Tue Jun 2 12:13:56 2009

It's odd that tramp does that -- ~/.ssh/known_hosts has been effectively encrypted (well, hashed, anyway) for a while now. (See <a href="http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=sshd&sektion=8&arch=&apropos=0&manpath=OpenBSD">http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=sshd&sektion=8&arch=&apropos=0&manpath=OpenBSD</a> Current). I think that was to prevent Evildoers from harvesting names of potential victim machines from people's known_hosts files.

Posted by Michael Olson at Tue Jun 2 21:58:29 2009

Yeah, I explicitly turned off hashing of known_hosts on my home machine so that I could remove stale entries if necessary.

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Blog - /Tech

Mon, 01 Jun 2009