After many years of commandline use, I've gotten spoiled by the
pervasiveness of GNU readline in shells and other shell-like apps,
like the MySQL shell. When I do sit down and try to use an app
without such support, the result is a fairly painful mix of cursing
and visible control characters (Oracle's sqlplus interface is
probably the poster child for miserable CLI experiences, with no
convenience facilities whatsoever).
An easy way around this is to use rlwrap, a nifty little program
that gives any badly-designed CLI interface full readline
capabilities, including command history, searching and editing.
Most Linux distros have packages for it, but if not, just download
and install the source yourself. It's not very large, and can be
installed in a local bin directory if needed. Then you do something
like 'rlwrap sqlplus FOO/password@db1 @sql/settings.sql' or 'rlwrap
mailx'. Enjoy!
