WLST and SQLPLus on Linux - get UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT and other keys working

[Originally posted on my old BEA Dev2Dev blog on July 24, 2007]

This has been bugging me for ages so today I spent some time trying to find a solution. I've managed to find one, so I thought I'd share it with you just in case it is useful to others....

When running command line tools in a Linux shell that read from standard input (using the 'readline' library under the covers), the UP and DOWN arrow keys can't be used to select previous history commands. Also, the LEFT, RIGHT arrow keys and the HOME and END keys can't be used to move to different parts of the current text line to easily correct mistakes in the line before submitting.

As a JavaEE/WebLogic user I find this really frustrating when I need to use tools like WLST or SQLPlus in interactive mode to mess around with WebLogic domains or change Oracle database schemas, respectively. Well the solution is a nifty little tool called rlfe which I found here.

Once installed, before running 'wlst.sh' or 'sqlplus' from a shell, first enter...

> rlfe

...and press return. Then when you run WLST or SQLPlus from the same shell, the interactive mode will work the way you always wanted it to. You'll be able to press the UP key to get to a previous command to execute it and you'll be able to press the LEFT key to move further back in the line of text to correct a typo.

The good news if you're a Ubuntu user is that this is available in the standard universe repository. To install it, just run....

> sudo apt-get install rlfe

Also, to avoid forgetting to run 'rlfe' before running your program, you can use an alias for the program to ensure that your program is always run in this 'enhanced' text entry mode. For example, add the following to ~/.bashrc :

alias sqlplus='rlfe sqlplus'

..then whenever you run sqlplus from the command line it'll work the way you want.

[In a comment on the original Dev2Dev blog 'eduardo_biagi' suggested an alternative tool called 'rlwrap' which works on Fedora. Since installing 8.04 version of Ubuntu, 'rlfe' does not work properly on Ubuntu so I now use 'rlwrap'. For example I have the following alias set up in my .bashrc: 'alias wlst='rlwrap /opt/oracle/wls1001/wlserver_10.0/common/bin/wlst.sh']

Soundtrack for today: Faded by The Afghan Whigs