arrow keys are not functional in sqlplus

Question

I find that the arrow keys don't work on the sqlplus console. For example if I press left arrow key, it shows like

SQL>^[[B 

Does any solutions exist to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You can use a third party utility called rlwrap.

rlwrap is a readline wrapper, a small utility that uses the GNU readline library to allow the editing of keyboard input for any other command. It maintains a separate input history for each command, and can TAB-expand words using all previously seen words and/or a user-specified file.

So you will be able to use arrows and also get a command history as a bonus.

After you have installed the utility run sqlplus the following way:

$ rlwrap sqlplus