I performed an upgrade from 5.1 to 6.0. After upgrade had completed the vi command recall and line editing will not work under bash. However, on another system that I did an install instead of an upgrade the vi command recall and line editing work fine. When you execute the "set -o vi" on both systems it does set the "vi" value to "on" as seen with a "set -o" command. However, on the upgrade system it doesn't work, and on the fresh install system it does. The bash fileset version is the same on both - bash-1.14.7-16.
Additional information: It seems that this problem is related to the /etc/inputrc file that is installed with Red Hat 6.0. The 5.x systems did not have that file. On systems where the vi command line editing does not work for bash when I remove the /etc/inputrc file it fixes the problem. I still don't know why the vi command line editing worked on scratch installed 6.0 systems with the /etc/inputrc file in place and not on the upgraded 5.x systems, though I have found out recently that in some cases it didn't work for any user other than root on a scratch installed 6.0 system. On upgraded 5.x systems it failed to work for all users including root.
Please dup this bug to 2397. Fix is comment out the assignment to 'INPUTRC' in /etc/profile. The supplied /etc/inputrc is bogus.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 2397 ***