my first ruby core patch - Alt-* commands in reverse-i-search

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:32:27 +0800 | Filed under ruby

For details on the bug itself, see the ticket description

Summary: in Ctrl-R (reverse-i-search), Alt-* leads to * being inserted at the cursor, instead of the command being executed. eg. 'f' is inserted when Alt-F is hit, instead of the cursor being moved to the end of word (forward-word).

It took quite some time to figure this one out. But I wasn't surprised - the effort spent is on the same order as with what I expected of debugging an event-driven library/framework.

Some notes:

• Alt: 27; f: 102; that's what you remember after staring at countless backtraces.
• readline's git repo tracks releases + patches. -_-'''
• gdb a.out then attach <pid> works like a charm. I had to run gdb with elevated privileges, though.