Normally I use Bash (and Readline in general) in my own environment, where I have a standard .inputrc set up to configure things to my liking (although it turns out that one particular setting doesn't work now (and may never have), and I didn't notice). However, sometimes I wind up using Bash in foreign environments, for example if I'm su'd to root at the moment, and when that happens the differences can be things that I get annoyed by. I spent a bit of today running into this again and being irritated enough that this time I figured out how to fix it on the fly.

The general Bash command to do readline things is ' bind ', and I believe it accepts all of the same syntax as readline init files do , both for keybindings and for turning off (mis-)features like bracketed paste (which we dislike enough that turning it off for root is a standard feature of our install framework). This makes it convenient if I forget the exact syntax, because I can just look at my standard .inputrc and copy lines from it.

What I want to do is the following:

• Switch Readline to the Unix word erase behavior I want :

  set bind-tty-special-chars off
Control-w: backward-kill-word

  Both of these are necessary because without the first, Bash will automatically bind Ctrl-w (my normal word-erase character) to ' unix-word-rubout ' and not let you override that with your own binding.

  (This is the difference that I run into all the time, because I'm very used to be able to use Ctrl-W to delete only the most recent component of a path. I think this partly comes from habit and partly because you tab-complete multi-component paths a component at a time, so if I mis-completed the latest component I want to Ctrl-W just it. M-Del is a standard Readline binding for this, but it's less convenient to type and not something I remember.)

• Make readline completion treat symbolic links to directories as if they were directories:

  set mark-symlinked-directories on

  When completing paths and so on, I mostly don't bother thinking about the difference between an actual directory (such as /usr/bin) and a symbolic link to a directory (such as /bin on modern Linuxes). If I type '/bi<TAB>' I want this to complete to '/bin/', not '/bin', because it's basically guaranteed that I will go on to tab-complete something in '/bin/'. If I actually want the symbolic link, I'll delete the trailing '/' (which does happen every so often, but much less frequently than I want to tab-complete through the symbolic link).

• Make readline forget any random edits I did to past history lines when I hit Return to finally do something:

  set revert-all-at-newline on

  The behavior I want from readline is that past history is effectively immutable. If I edit some bit of it and then abandon the edit by moving to another command in the history (or just start a command from scratch), the edited command should revert to being what I actually typed back when I executed it no later than when I hit Return on the current command and start a new one. It infuriates me when I cursor-up (on a fresh command) and don't see exactly the past commands that I typed.

  (My notes say I got this from Things You Didn't Know About GNU Readline .)

This is more or less in the order I'm likely to fix them. The different (and to me wrong) behavior of C-w is a relatively constant irritation, while the other two are less frequent.

(If this irritates me enough on a particular system, I can probably do something in root's .bashrc, if only to add an alias to use ' bind -f ... ' on a prepared file. I can't set these in /root/.inputrc, because my co-workers don't particularly agree with my tastes on these and would probably be put out if standard readline behavior they're used to suddenly changed on them.)

(In other Readline things I want to remember, there's Readline's support for fishing out last or first or Nth arguments from earlier commands .)