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

[John P. Linderman]

On vacation, with just an iPad keyboard, so I apologize for not doing more
digging.  As I noted, when taking the blame for the Great Echo Schism, my
early exposure to a hp2640 terminal that allowed “rentry” of a previous
command was partly to blame. It also led me to use a PS1 ending in @, the
default line-kill. When I reentered a command, the @ wiped out the prompt
stuff, and only the command survived.

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 10:15 AM Brian Zick <brian at zick.io> 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.
>
> In NetBSD 7 the default is ';', but I don't see any reference to a default
> $prompt in the manual on that system. I wonder if this was a change unique
> to Berkeley.
>
> B
>
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