It seems the readline library takes care of this problem.

I'm currently working on a homework assignment to write a shell. I've got pretty much all of it done, but I'm having some problems getting arrow key history working. I spent a decent amount of time playing with curses last night and while I have something that could be used to do arrow key history I don't really like the way curses works. Does anyone know if there is a way to implement this with out curses? Alternatively, if some one knows how...