Re: Readline macro question

[Chet Ramey]

On 7/29/22 6:44 PM, Robert E. Griffith wrote:
> Thanks Koichi Murase,  This opens up a whole new set of possibilities for 
> me. For some reason I thought -x only executed external commands and I 
> would not be able to change the environment.
>
> Is there a way to get readline to return from inside the 
> rl_print_line_and_clear function? Like simulating a \n? I tried appending a 
> \n to READLINE_LINE but that did not cause it to return

That has the same effect as if you had entered ^V^M. Adding a character to
the line buffer does not make it appear in readline's input.

> If not, I think I can use a macro that invokes a shell function and then 
> has a \C-m to tell readline to return.  

That is the most common idiom. You use a macro that contains the key
sequences you want to appear on readline's input, exactly as if they had
been read from the keyboard. If you bind a key sequence to a shell
command using `bind -x', you need to put that key sequence in the macro.

> I can only invoke a readline 
> function from within a macro string if that function has a keyseq bound to it?

Yes, there is no other way to invoke a bindable readline command.

>     $ bind -x '"<someObscureKey>": fooFn'
>     $ bind '"\eOP": "<someObscureKey>\C-m"'

Exactly.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/