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I am unable to open a pdf file which starts with (. For example: (3311) M3N78-EM.pdf
Are there any arguments to be given?
I have invoked with evince command.
When I type evince (and press tab, nothing happens. In other words, tab completion doesn't work after (.
Can anyone help?

Sylwester
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user178196
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    Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. Please be a little bit more specific or detailed about whay you're trying to accomplish, or take a look at What kind of questions should I not ask here? – Danatela Jul 25 '13 at 06:24
  • Can you clearly point out the name of pdf file you want to open and the tool you're trying to open with? – psukys Jul 25 '13 at 06:52
  • See if you can use the advice here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/275976/how-to-protecting-cd-command-to-deal-with-parentheses/275989#275989 for your situation. –  Jul 25 '13 at 11:00

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To use tab completion you need to escape some symbols that are used by the shell for other purposes. Parenthesis, hyphen, and dollar sign are some of them that needs a backslash escape so that the shell doesn't think you are trying to do something else. A different way to do it is to use single quote. That will escape everything except single quotes within.

Try:

evince '(TAB

If you have more than one match you just continue writing and pressing TAB until you have a unique match.

The alternatives are:

evince "(TAB

Here you cannot use $ in the file name since the shell will think it's a variable.

evince \(TAB

You need to backslash every char that needs to while you are finding a unique match. Eg. if it stops at \(3311 you need to type \)TAB to continue.

Sylwester
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