Make Arrow and delete keys work in KornShell command line

unix shell ksh
user66854 picture user66854 · Oct 26, 2009 · Viewed 47.2k times · Source

I am new to Unix and am using sun solaris (v10 I think). I have my shell set as KornShell (ksh).

I am wondering how to make the arrow keys and delete key work in the command line. I have done set -o emacs and the backspace works, but not the arrow keys and the delete keys.

Also is it possible to set the up and down arrow key to cycle through the command line history?

Answer

Tim picture Tim · Mar 29, 2010

For the arrow keys, you can put this into your the .kshrc file in your home directory:

set -o emacs
alias __A=`echo "\020"`     # up arrow = ^p = back a command
alias __B=`echo "\016"`     # down arrow = ^n = down a command
alias __C=`echo "\006"`     # right arrow = ^f = forward a character
alias __D=`echo "\002"`     # left arrow = ^b = back a character
alias __H=`echo "\001"`     # home = ^a = start of line
alias __Y=`echo "\005"`     # end = ^e = end of line

Note that there are two underscore characters before the letters on the left side of the equal sign. On the right-hand side of the equal, the goal is to get the proper control character assigned to the alias. The way this script does that, is by running the command (via back-tics) 

echo "\020"

to get the control-n character assigned to __B.

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