* Installation problems:

rlwrap needs the readline library (ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/),
version 4.2 or newer. For .deb or .rpm users: install the readline
-devel- package!

Even though rlwrap now uses the excellent pseudo-terminal (pty)
handling code from rxvt, portable programming with ptys is something
of a black art. The configure script tries to guess how ptys have to
be handled on your system, but it may guess wrong. To quote rxvt's
configure script: "if we don't guess right then it's up to the user",
which means that you have to manually edit config.h (and save a copy
of it somewhere, as configure will create a new config.h when it runs.

Andreas Leitgeb wrote:

  "If (on Solaris) configure fails to detect your libreadline, 
  then (temporarily) move the dynamic libs libreadline.so*
  out of sight, and try again. (seems to be a problem in the
  readline-package obtained from sunfreeware.com)"


Christoffer Dam Bruun reported:

  "I have just installed rlwrap along with readline on Solaris 8 and
  found that rlwrap did not work properly with readline 4.3. After
  linking rlwrap with readline 4.2 it works correctly.

  What happended using readline 4.3 was that an extra prompt would be 
  written after the first letter on a line, e.g. with a sqlplus prompt:
  SQL>
  (now writing select )
  SQL> sSQL> select"

I (HL) have not been able to reproduce this. 

After "configure", make wil re-run configure. This is a minor
annoyance, and probably due to my poor understanding of automake. 

* Run-time problems

rlwrap cannot handle prompts that contain control characters.  Any
client that uses color and/or curses will confuse rlwrap (though you
may not notice this until your cursor almost reaches end-of-line) This
is unlikely to change, as is is practically impossible (given a
terminal type and an initial position) to calculate the screen
position after an arbitrary sequence of bytes.


readline-4.3 tries to recognize multibyte characters. As rlwrap may
use any part of the clients output as "prompt" (even if you decide to
dump a binary file to stdout) this can confuse readline, which may
even dump core on occasion (this may be dependent on your locale
settings) If this becomes annoying, you could revert to readline-4.2
(which does not try to recognise multi-byte characters) or apply the
latest patches to readline-4.3

Filename completion is an ugly  hack. If you typed "impossib" and your
completion wordlist contains "impossible" you wont't see the file
"impossibility". This is on the TODO list.








 
