Where can I find documentation for readline?

The read builtin command has -e option

-e Use Readline to handle input. This permits input editing in the same manner as the command line.

What's Readline in the specification:

$ man readline
No manual entry for readline
$ man Readline
No manual entry for Readline

There are no details of readline.

4 Answers

See man bash, which has an entire section on Readline:

READLINE This is the library that handles reading input when using an interactive shell, unless the --noediting option is given at shell invocation. Line editing is also used when using the -e option to the read builtin.

GNU Readline is a library that's developed alongside bash, but is used by a number of other programs to provide better interactive command-line usage (for example, Python's REPL loop). It can be configured using ~/.inputrc or /etc/inputrc. See the readline site for more details.

To jump directly to the READLINE section of the bash man page, I define the following alias in my $HOME/.bash_aliases file.

alias man-readline="man -P 'less -p ^READLINE' bash"

Use man 3 readline for man page for Readline.

Use info rluserman for the complete manual, with interactive links.

Hit H and the bottom half of the screen will display a list of commands you can use to find what you need. Such as [ and ] to go through the nodes in rluserman. Or try to find something specific by starting a search, for example:

Suppose you were looking for the vi-editing-mode;

1. hit / to start a search
2. type your query, e.g. vi, and confirm by hitting Enter
3. use { and } to go back and forth through the occurrences in the manual.

(PS. vi\W', would be better because this would rule out hits like 'provided')