More on Bash and readline

In the man page for bind it says I can make modifications to the settings by creating a ~/.inputrc. I tried that, but it doesn't seem to have any affect on the settings. Is it overridden by the /etc/inputrc? Also, is there a way to echo the key codes that I would put in such a file? For example, I want to map Ctrl+Delete to copy region as kill. How do I find out what the acceptable representation for that combination would be? STH