Thank you Michael; I have saved the remarks that you sent me for future use. The whole solution was contained in those notes. For those who maybe having similar problems. On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 13:37 -0500, William Case wrote: > Hi; > > On and off for the last few years I have tried to get readline to bind > commands as I want them but they never have. I am sure I am doing > something stupid or mis-interpreting the manuals and all the previous > advice I have received. I posted this problem over a week ago on the > Fedora Forum but got nothing helpful. So here -- slowly -- is my > problem. > Ultimately the answer was to substitute \e for \M in the 'bind' command and/or .inputrc. Strictly following the bash quotation rules as pointed out got the 'bind' command working. However, and perhaps defensively, I have to blame the bash manual description for my difficulties. Nowhere is there a suggestion that \e might be substituted for \M, if \M (Alt) isn't working as the Meta key. \M (Alt) does work as the Meta key in my Emacs. In fact, all the examples and cursory explanations lead one away from the e\ solution and all the sites that I googled were substantially a repeat of the manual. There is no explanation of what key strokes mean e.g. a meaningful translation of "\eOd", "\e[1;5D", "\e[5D", etc. or a link or a suggested site to find further information. As a result I had no inkling of what the key bindings as shown in /etc/inputrc were. Reference to Emacs is misleading in this context. Yes I understand what emacs mode is, but as used in the manual I fully expected to be able to use and/or create emacs bindings that are familiar to me. None worked. Thank you for the introduction to the ^V key sequence. Where would I find a manual description of its use? cat -v I had never used before and had to look it up in man cat. It will remain part of my command repertoire. -- Regards Bill Fedora 12, Gnome 2.28 Evo.2.28, Emacs 23.1.1 -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines