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

arnold at skeeve.com arnold at skeeve.com
Tue Aug 7 17:50:21 AEST 2018


Kurt H Maier <khm at sciops.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 09:53:33PM +0100, Brian Zick wrote:
> >
> > rc uses ;
>        
> Does it?  10th edition Unix and Plan 9 rc both have ('% ' ' ') as the   
> default value of $prompt.  At least that's how it's described in the
> manual.  None of the v8/9/10 tarballs in the archive contain rc code,
> but some contain manual source, and those describe % prompts.
>
> I've seen other references to ; (presumably  ('; ' ' ')) as the rc 
> prompt but I've never seen it in the wild.  Does anyone here know what 
> the story is?
>        
> khm

I believe that Tom Duff's rc does indeed use ('% ' ' '). But I think that
Byron Rakitsis's version changed the default to ('; ' ' ') exactly for
the reason that it's copyable/pastable.

HTH,

Arnold



More information about the TUHS mailing list