expansion of environment variables

[ruud grosmann <r.grosmann@xxxxxxxxx>]

hi list,

this is my first post. Hopefully this is not the kind of question that
is asked a dozen times before.... :)

I work on different machines and use zsh as my login shell. On my own
machine I can update software, on the others not. That is why most of
the machines contain zsh version 3.0 (according to the man page),
whereas my own machine has zsh 4.3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu).

The new version has a feature that is not in the 3.0 version. I would
like to disable the feature, but I am not sure if an option exist for
that one. Maybe you can help me.


The feature is about expansion of variables during file completion.
Assume my directory contains

1234.log   1234.xml  2345.xml

when I set variable key to '2345' and I do

$ /opt/archives/scripts/bin/convert $key.<TAB>

the OLD version expands this to

$ /opt/archives/scripts/bin/convert $key.xml

whereas the new version expands it to

$ /opt/archives/scripts/bin/convert 2345.xml

I would like to have the old behaviour in my new zsh, so that I can
reuse the command line for different values of key. Since it is a new
feature, I suspect there must be a way to prevent the shell from
substituting the variable with its value. Am I overlooking it in the
docs?

thanks in advance, Ruud