Why doesn't ~/inputrc work

[Harry Putnam <reader at newsguy dot com>]

setup:  Cygwin (very recent update) on win 7 (64bit)

   ls /etc/setup/*read*
  /etc/setup/libreadline7.lst.gz  /etc/setup/readline.lst.gz

-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 

I've never had a cygwin install where using an ~/.inputrc worked.
I've tried quite a few times over the yrs of using cygwin but never
really followed up failed attempts with a dedicated effort to find out
why.

Finally decided to try to find out where the problem is.

Googling this morning has been pretty discouraging, so many things
have the term `inputrc'.  And when coupled with `cygwin', or several
other filtering strings like `broken' or `does not work', etc, I've not
hit on a page that is recognizable as being useful to solve the
problem.

Searching gmane.os.cygwin with similar strings, has not been
productive either.

Lots of commentary about various inputrc entries and such but not
finding much to help find out why it does not work for me.

Searching the last 3000 message subject lines turns up quite a few
announcements about various upgrades to libreadline but scanning the
content hasn't turned up much about troubleshooting.

I know the basics of inputrc and readline from long use of linux OS,
but with readline and libreadline installed, I never see an
/etc/inputrc appear.  Is there no sample /etc/inputrc included? or am
I not installing something necessary for that file to turn up?

Further, when I create an ~/.inputrc and pressing C-x C-r, none of
the entries have any effect whatever.  Restarting bash has no helping
influence either.

Perhaps the keyboard is seen differently on windows and the alt key
does not work, but it appears to work as expected for example in
emacs.

A sample from my ~/.inputrc:

  ## C-x C-r to reread this init file
  "\M-a": "awk 'BEGIN{ print ( )}'"
  "\M-d": "date +\"%s\""
  [...]

Those and a number of other similar cmds work fine on linux but not on
my cygwin installs.   Both on Win7 and WinXp pro. Not to mention
having failed for yrs now.

How might I proceed to determine where the problem is?



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