How to set shell to wrap words for long commands?

Question

I connect to a Slackware server. When a command is longer than the size of the putty window, the line continues in the same line, and the start of the command disappears as I continue adding to the same command, just putting a "<" at the beginning of the line.

When I work on the Red Hat server, I can see the whole command because the console just adds lines as it needs.

I don't know where I turn on word wrapping. Where can I set the Slackware server to wrap words as my Red Hat server does? P.S.: Excuse my English.

Answer 1

This may be because you're using bash (or other shell which uses readline) and in your ~/.inputrc (or global /etc/inputrc) you have

set horizontal-scroll-mode On

From man readline:

horizontal-scroll-mode (Off)
When set to On, makes readline use a single line for display, scrolling the input horizontally on a single screen line when it becomes longer than the screen width rather than wrapping to a new line.

Solution: delete the line (the default setting is Off) or explicitly set the option to Off:

set horizontal-scroll-mode Off

Readline uses /etc/inputrc only if ~/.inputrc doesn't exist or cannot be read (~/.inputrc may also $include /etc/inputrc), so even if there's On in /etc/inputrc and you cannot or don't want to change it, you can always overwrite the setting by editing ~/.inputrc.

The change won't automatically affect already running shells. You can reload the config with

bind -f ~/.inputrc

(see this), or change only that setting with

bind 'set horizontal-scroll-mode off'

---

The readline library will also fall back to horizontal-scroll-mode if the TERM environment variable is set to a terminal name not found in the terminfo database; you can check if that's the case with the infocmp command. See here for how you can remediate the situation.

---

A similar interface (but displaying the < mark at the right end of the line) is used in some pdksh-derived shells which do not use readline (notably mksh, the default on Android). For that case there's no possible work-around.