Bash shell tab completion, don't expand the ~

Disabling tilde expansion is quick and painless. Open up ~/.bashrc and insert this:

_expand()
{
    return 0;
}

This will override the expand function from /etc/bash_completion. I'd recommend commenting on what it does above the function in case you want the expansion back in the future. Changes will take effect in a new instance.

With newer bash_completion it seems you also need to override __expand_tilde_by_ref:

__expand_tilde_by_ref() {
  return 0
}