This Tip was taken from a TechRepublic article by Vincent Danen. It will allow the user to map unused key combinations to run custom commands in the shell.
To obtain the key sequence from a function key, use the read command. The following is an example of pressing the [F12] key:
$ read
^[[24~
Note that different keyboards will produce different key sequences, and modifiers to the function keys (such as [Ctrl][F12] or [Shift][F12]) will produce other sequences as well.
The next step is to bind that key sequence to a particular shell command. For example, you can bind [F12] to the ‘history-search-backward’ shell command:
$ bind ‘’\e[24~’: history-search-backward’
– Suramya