[mintty 0.9.2] cmd.exe history doesn't work properly

[Daniel Colascione]

On 11/15/2010 1:39 PM, Patches Houlihan wrote:
> Browsing through the command history in cygwin's cmd.exe access to the
> Windows shell doesn't work properly in mintty.  Instead of showing
> previous commands, the up and down keys just move a cursor on the
> screen.  Using up/down works fine with bash on mintty and cmd.exe
> works fine in the standard Windows console Cygwin terminal.

It's a well-known problem: Cygwin pseudo-terminals look like pipes to
Windows, so cmd thinks it's being run non-interactively.

You have two solutions:

1) Use the "conin wrapper" around cmd to give the program a real
terminal, or

2) Better yet, use "rlwrap cmd" so you get nice readline-based line
editing and persistent history with cmd.


(I still need to get around to packaging a newer version of rlwrap, but
the current one should work fine for this purpose.)

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