Baffled by readline module

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, 10 Mar 2023 at 06:28, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In an interactive command-line Python program on Linux, I want to be
> able to read a line at a time from stdin, providing command line
> history and editing to the user. In C, I would use GNU readline to do
> that.
>
> Python has the readline module, which appears to be a wrapper for GNU
> readline. However, I've read and re-read the documenation for that
> module, but I'm completely baffled. There's all sorts of stuff about
> history files, but I neither need nor want a history file. Likewise
> tab-completion: don't want it.  All the examples not only involve
> history files and tab-completion but they're somehow connected to the
> interactive Python REPL, which is also completely off-base for my use
> case.
>
> Is the readline module not the right tool for an interactive Linux
> command-line application that needs to provide command line recall and
> editing to the user who's entering stuff on stdin from a tty?
>

Not sure about the history file, and I would assume that if you don't
configure one, history is simply lost when you restart. But with tab
completion, unless you need to be able to input a tab character, it
should be safe to ignore the feature and leave it at the defaults.

ChrisA