Bash and readline: how to bind key to a "silent command" of my own in bash?

Question

What I want to do is simple: add a keybinding to one of my program using readline startup file inputrc but, in addition, as my program does not produce any output, I do not want the command name to appear on stdout.

What my problem is:

.inputrc content:

"\e[1;5A":'pipe_send\n'

When I hit ctrl+uparrow, on the command line appears "pipe_send":

[ alexkag@$$$$$:: / ] $ pipe_send

What I'd like is not having pipe_send appear on the command line, just like the commands provided by readline such as history-search-backward, history-search-forward, etc. Do you know any way to do that? Maybe shoudn't I use readline? Note: my keybinding must only be visible in bash, not to the whole system.

I don't know much about key binding, but since you have already done some research , I believe this link help you in some way. stackoverflow.com/questions/4200800/… — mainframer
– mainframer, Commented May 31, 2015 at 12:39
I guess you want to put this in your .bashrc: bind -x '"\e[1;5A":pipe_send'. — gniourf_gniourf
– gniourf_gniourf, Commented May 31, 2015 at 13:11
I don't know anything about readline programming, but keywords such as history-search-forward in .inputrc are not quoted. I guess they are kind of constants? However, in your example you quote your command (pipe_send) as a string which is weird... — cychoi
– cychoi, Commented May 31, 2015 at 13:23
@KarolyHorvath Okay, I got it now. He's not using the readline library to write a program which react to the keybindings. Rather, he's using bash to respond to a key press sequence and then bash will output the string to standard output(?) which hopefully can be fed to his program. — cychoi
– cychoi, Commented May 31, 2015 at 13:32

miken32 · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-20 09:12:55Z

As mentioned in the comments by gniourf_gniourf the solution is:

bind -x '"\e[1;5A":pipe_send'

bind -x will tell bash to execute a command whenever a certain key is pressed:

-x keyseq:shell-command

Cause shell-command to be executed whenever keyseq is entered. When shell-command is executed, the shell sets the READLINE_LINE variable to the contents of the Readline line buffer and the READLINE_POINT variable to the current location of the insertion point. If the executed command changes the value of READLINE_LINE or READLINE_POINT, those new values will be reflected in the editing state.

\e[1;5A is the terminal code sent for CtrlUp

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