FINAL THOUGHT — BASH FEATURE SUGGESTION: At the moment, this external command line reveals the version of Readline that Bash is using:
gdb bash -batch -ex 'printf "%04x\n", (int) rl_readline_version' Given how utterly fundamental Readline is to the functioning of Bash, perhaps it should become a built-in option of Bash itself — like this: ----------------------- bash --readline-version This instance of GNU Bash is using the GNU Readline library, version 8.1 ----------------------- That would certainly be a more intuitive and human-friendly method.
