# Irb command history problems under Ruby-1.8.4 and Mandriva 2

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/irb-command-history-problems-under-ruby-1-8-4-and-mandriva-2/98210>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [July 13, 2006, 3:29am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/irb-command-history-problems-under-ruby-1-8-4-and-mandriva-2/98210 "2006-07-13T03:29:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![richard\_apodaca](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@richard\_apodaca](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richard_apodaca)\
**Post date:** [July 13, 2006, 3:29am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/irb-command-history-problems-under-ruby-1-8-4-and-mandriva-2/98210/1 "2006-07-13T03:29:47Z")

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A few months ago problems were reported with irb’s  
command history when Ruby-1.8.4 was compiled on a  
Mandriva 2006 system:

[http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/185233](http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/185233)

I had exactly the same problem on my Mandiva 2006  
system when upgrading to Ruby-1.8.4. I could find no  
RPM, so I decided to compile myself. That’s when the  
fun started.

ruby --version showed 1.8.4 had been installed, but  
using the up arrow in irb gave garbage (something like  
“[[A”).

Previous postings on this list tracked the problem  
down to a missing readline-devel library, but I didn’t  
find any follow-up to indicate installing it actually  
fixed the problem

My system had libreadline5 but not readline5-devel.  
Using urpmi, I installed it using urpmi. (The output  
from ./configure in 1.8.4 gave nothing to indicate  
that the presence of libreadline was checked.) I then  
ran make-clean, ./configure, make and make install.  
Still, I had no command history in irb after launching  
a new bash shell.

I’ve previously compiled a few packages from source  
where rpm dependencies were missing. I just installed  
the rpm’s and was then able to successfully compile  
and run the resulting binaries - without rebooting.

Nevertheless, I figured it couldn’t hurt to reboot, so  
I did. I immediately did make clean, ./configure, make  
and make install. At this point the irb command  
history worked perfectly.

Unfortunately, I was trying a lot things to try to get  
this working - and I wasn’t taking notes. So maybe one  
of the things I tried but forgot actually did the  
trick. The only things I can say are that the irb  
command history didn’t work until after I rebooted and  
the only package I installed was libreadline5-devel.

cheers,  
rich

P.S. Although I used urpme to uninstall the Ruby-1.8.2  
distribution, I still found ruby files in /usr/bin  
(for example, /usr/bin/ruby. Compiling the 1.8.4  
source put binaries in /usr/local/bin. Maybe the  
problem had something to do with this configuration.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![richard\_apodaca](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@richard\_apodaca](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richard_apodaca)\
**Post date:** [July 13, 2006, 3:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/irb-command-history-problems-under-ruby-1-8-4-and-mandriva-2/98210/2 "2006-07-13T15:59:30Z")

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On Jul 12, 2006, at 9:28 PM, richard apodaca wrote:

> [snip: wrestling with readline]

If the problem is similar to the above link, you likely have a bad  
installation. Check to make sure that ./configure found ncurses,  
readline, etc. The procedure was pretty well discussed in that thread.

The thing that they might have missed on the thread is that on  
systems like mandriva, you usually need the \*-dev rpm to compile  
stuff. readline-dev, for example.  
-Mat