Description of problem:

Starting with Fedora 7, the xterm terminfo description added the "smm" attribute:

infocmp xterm | grep smm
        smir=\E[4h, smkx=\E[?1h\E=, smm=\E[?1034h, smso=\E[7m,

man terminfo describes this as:

       meta_on                        smm         mm         turn on meta mode
                                                             (8th-bit on)

Apparently, the readline library emits this at initialization.  This can cause
problems with certain configure scripts that attempt to obtain version
information from program via methods like:

version=`echo "disp(OCTAVE_VERSION)" | octave -qf`

as the escape sequence gets embedded.

I'm not really sure if there is anything to fix in readline/ncurses to address
this or just tell people to write better configure scripts, but it is certainly
surprising behavior.

Possibly readline should behave differently if stdin or stdout is a file or pipe?

Test code:

$ cat readline.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <readline/readline.h>

main() {
       char *ans = readline (">");
       puts(ans);
}
$ gcc -o readline readline.c  -l readline
$ echo blah | ./readline  > out
$ od -a out
0000000 esc   [   ?   1   0   3   4   h   >   b   l   a   h  nl
0000016