[TUHS] Origins of shell prompt suffixes % $ > #

Brian Zick brian at zick.io
Tue Aug 7 06:53:33 AEST 2018


Hi,

I usually just lurk on this list, but I've been curious lately about the origin of the symbols at the end of various interactive prompts.

ksh (etc), bash, sh use $ for non-root, and # for root

csh, tcsh and zsh use % for non-root and # for root

fish and things like mysql, ftp, and interactive shells for a lot of scripting languages use >

rc uses ;

Where do these different conventions originate?

B



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