-------------------------------------- HOWTO for libreadline support in JRuby -------------------------------------- JRuby ships with a readline.rb that uses the java-readline JNI library for libreadline support. readline provides line-editing and line-history capabilities to console applications. In JRuby, the "jirb" interactive shell can automatically provide these features when the java-readline library is present and working. WHERE: The java-readline project is at java-readline.sourceforge.net HOW: Download the source from the project site (tested with 0.8.0) and build it as appropriate for your system. The default makefiles work correctly under Linux variants; changes are necessary for OS X and may be necessary for other UNIX variants. Once the java-readline library is installed (and libreadline is available on the host system) you will need to make the shared object (dynamic library) available in whatever way is appropriate for your system, and put the java-readline JAR file (libreadline-java.jar at time of writing) in your CLASSPATH. Once this is done, readline.rb should work correctly. TROUBLESHOOTING: java-readline comes with a simple test program run as follows: java test.ReadlineTest If the library is built correctly and both the shared object and JAR file are available, the above program should present a "linux>" prompt. If you have trouble getting java-readline to work, use the output from the test program to troubleshoot.