why won't bash display the results of a 'bind -p' command?

Question

bash refuses to give me the output of 'bind -p' when I pass it in with the -c switch:

bash -c 'bind -p'

but it works to type

bind -p

directly at the bash prompt, and it works to type something like

bash -c 'echo "hi"'

and zsh happily does exactly what bash refuses to do (well, the equivalent command in zsh):

zsh -c 'bindkey -L'

What on earth is going on???

Answer 1

When you run bash with the -c option, bash runs in non-interactive mode. Apparently, the bind builtin doesn't generate output when bash is in non-interactive mode. You can force bash to interactive mode by giving the -i option. The following works for me:

bash -i -c 'bind -p'

Answer 2

OK, I have a partial answer that I just discovered after entering my question...

If I type

bash -c "set -o emacs && bind -p"

then it gives the output of the bind command. It seems that for some reason bash doesn't have a default key map, which is really odd.

(I had had something sourced by my .bash_profile which had an error--something that worked fine in zsh but which bash choked on (apparently bash doesn't allow using 'else' in scripts!?)--and so I just disabled it, figuring default settings would be cleaner anyway.)

It's almost unthinkable that bash doesn't default to either a vi or an emacs keymap. Or is there something else going on that is escaping me?