Question

I’m running the Python CLI under Linux:

bla:visualization> python
Python 2.1.1 (#18, Nov  1 2001, 11:15:13) 
[GCC egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 

For some reason the arrow keys and the delete key don’t work:

delete:

>>> x^H^H^H

up arrow:

>>> x^[[A^[[A

etc…

How can I make these work?

Answer 1

The basic problem is that your Python installation was likely not compiled with the readline library. You can confirm this by trying to import the readline module:

import readline

You should get an error when you import if readline is not present.

If this is the case, there’s not much you can do other than recompile Python with the readline library, if you can.