Irb command history issues with ruby 1.9.1p129

Hi all,

I’ve recently installed ruby 1.9.1 from source w/o any special issues on
ubuntu linux 9.04. Everything works great except scrolling command
history in irb with the up/down arrow keys. I’m sure you guys can
appreciate how annoying it is to retype everything (yeah, I’m lazy).

Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? I read that it has
something to do with readline library, but after installing those (both
GNU and ruby’s) and rebuilding didn’t change much. I also read a post on
using

$ ./configure --with-readline-dir=/usr/local

for build, but that was on a mac and it doesn’t seem to be a valid
configure flag (make didn’t recognize it). It was also a fairly old
post.

Any ideas on how to solve this will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

sa 125 wrote:

Hi all,

I’ve recently installed ruby 1.9.1 from source w/o any special issues on
ubuntu linux 9.04. Everything works great except scrolling command
history in irb with the up/down arrow keys. I’m sure you guys can
appreciate how annoying it is to retype everything (yeah, I’m lazy).

Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? I read that it has
something to do with readline library, but after installing those (both
GNU and ruby’s) and rebuilding didn’t change much. I also read a post on

I installed 1.9.1p129 a few weeks ago on Fedora Core 10-64 and the irb
CL history is fine. It almost certainly uses readline and probably
would not build at all without it, but just in case: are you sure you
installed the DEVELOPMENT libraries for GNU readline, which are required
for source builds, and not just the normal library package, which is
just objects for pre-built binaries to link to.

Ruby readline() is probably a red herring here.

Mk 27 wrote:

sa 125 wrote:

Hi all,

I’ve recently installed ruby 1.9.1 from source w/o any special issues on
ubuntu linux 9.04. Everything works great except scrolling command
history in irb with the up/down arrow keys. I’m sure you guys can
appreciate how annoying it is to retype everything (yeah, I’m lazy).

Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? I read that it has
something to do with readline library, but after installing those (both
GNU and ruby’s) and rebuilding didn’t change much. I also read a post on

I installed 1.9.1p129 a few weeks ago on Fedora Core 10-64 and the irb
CL history is fine. It almost certainly uses readline and probably
would not build at all without it, but just in case: are you sure you
installed the DEVELOPMENT libraries for GNU readline, which are required
for source builds, and not just the normal library package, which is
just objects for pre-built binaries to link to.

Ruby readline() is probably a red herring here.

You’re right - I got the development package for GNU readline
(libreadline5-dev) and rebuilt, and irb worked fine. Thanks!

sa 125 wrote:

Ruby readline() is probably a red herring here.

You’re right - I got the development package for GNU readline
(libreadline5-dev) and rebuilt, and irb worked fine. Thanks!

Oh thanks, that was bugging me too, already. Sweet!

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