Arrow up and down does not work any more in Perl debugger and CPAN client

Following on from the answers from LeoNerd and Hakon :- On CentOS 7 I had to run

sudo yum install perl-Term-ReadLine-Gnu

to install the module. Now the arrow keys work in perl -d


If you want to avoid installing additional OS libraries (or need to because you don't have root/sudo) you can just use CPAN to grab one of these two Perl implementations of Readline:

  • Term::ReadLine::Perl (Perl implementation of Readline libraries)
  • Term::Readline::Zoid (Pure Perl implementation of Readline libraries)

It's especially handy if you already have your own local Perl install (eg, using Perlbrew).


By default the only Term::ReadLine handler you get is Term::ReadLine::Perl which is quite simple and doesn't understand things like arrow keys. You probably want to install Term::ReadLine::Gnu.