Shell - Page Up/Down, Home/End Keys not working

I'm using PuTTY to connect to my DreamHost, but my page up/down, home and end keys don't seem to work. I get a tilde when I press them. Anyone know what the problem is? I created an inputrc file (and exported the environment variable for it), but it didn't seem to change anything.

This is a PuTTY thing. I'd ask them or check your preferences An SSH/Telnet client has to "save" the history locally in order for you to page through as you'd expect. If you don't have any paging history turned on or it's too low, you'll be unable to pageup or down.

See if setting TERM to "putty" works. Assuming bash is your shell, do:

export TERM=putty

if this fixes things, you can configure PuTTY to send "putty" as its terminal string in PuTTY's menu. It's possible that the termcap entry for "putty" is old or doesn't work perfectly, but I think it should more or less work. You could also try xterm-color and xterm-xfree86, though technically you shouldn't use either of these.

Just so you know, a lot of times, page-up / page-down work on programs within the shell and shift page-up and shift page-down works on the terminal's scrollback buffer. That's how xterm works, and (IIRC) putty and SecureCRT as well. OS X's Terminal client works the opposite way. So if you're trying to page-up / page-down through the scrollback buffer, try using shift page-up / shift page-down.

You're seeing a tilde (and probably another character or two) because PuTTY is sending a control string which isn't recognized as a capability of your $TERM setting (probably xterm, which is what putty sends as its terminal string by default).