Seeing escape characters when pressing the arrow k

Question

In shells like the interactive python shell, you can usually use the arrow keys to move around in the current line or get previous commands (with arrow-up) etc.

But after I ssh into another machine and start python there, I get sessions like:

>>> import os 
>>> ^[[A    

where the last character comes from arrow-up. Or, using arrow-left:

>>> impor^[[D

How can I fix this?

In the regular bash, arrow keys work fine. The weird behavior is just in the interactive python (or perl etc.) shell.

Answer 1

Looks like readline is not enabled. Check if PYTHONSTARTUP variable is defined, for me it points to /etc/pythonstart and that file is executed by the python process before going interactive, which setups readline/history handling.

Thanks to @chown here is the docs on this: http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/interactive.html