[TUHS] shell PS1/PS2 which survive cut-paste

George Michaelson ggm at algebras.org
Wed Dec 6 11:22:52 AEST 2017


I tried a long time ago to set PS1 and PS2 to character sequences
which would permit cut-paste to work. I failed, but I didn't try very
hard.

The choice of "# " and "> " interests me. Because roots prompt of
"hash" has a side effect of making a cut-paste over it a comment in
most shells.

But.. it predates being *able* to cut-paste so it has to be a
side-effect, not a design choice.

"> " is more dangerous in cut-paste. Which again feels like a
side-effect both by anachronistic time effects, and intent: nobody
would be that suicidally mad to make cut-paste invoke shell
pre-forming the command sequence which neccessarily zeros out the >
targets before executing the cmd...

-G



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