shell retrieve history (up arrow) not working

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Marty Landman" <martster at gmail.com> writes:

> I have a 4.8 installation with a root account and one user account. The root
> account up-arrow history retrieve feature works fine, while on my user
> account it doesn't, displaying instead
>
> $ ^[[A^[[C^[[B^[[D
>
> when I press the arrow keys in order (up, right, down, left)

They are using different shells.  Root uses csh by default, your user
account is using sh.  Try "set -o emacs" for sh.  [Or try csh, but I
try to avoid that because it's so bad as a scripting language.]