Display all 2727 possibilities? (y or n)

[David Malcolm]

On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 11:43 +0900, Joel wrote:
> I have one of those terminal switches so I can use one monitor and one
> keyboard and work out of a Fedora Core 2 box and a MSWxxx box at the
> same time. I just switched back to the FC2 box, and in the open shell
> window was the following:
> 
>     [user at workstation user]$
>     Display all 2727 possibilities? (y or n)
>     [user at workstation user]$
> 
> Nothing more. The terminal session still seems to be responsive. Neither top
> nor ps waux show anything I recognize as deviant or malignant.
> 
> A search of google for "2727 possibilities" turns up one blog and one
> post to a forum where the blogger had apparently asked the question, but
> no answer.
> 
> Anyone with any idea what's going on with this? Should I be pulling the
> ethernet and starting in on forensics? (I do need a good excuse to scrub
> and install FC3 anyway.)

Sounds like two tab keystrokes are getting sent to the terminal; this
makes bash try to autocomplete the command you've typed.  Since you
haven't actually typed anything, all possible commands on the system can
complete that (empty) string.  This is too many for bash to reasonably
display at once, so it asks if you really want to see all 2727 of them.

Hope this helps.