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

[William Corcoran]

I too have not seen all of the messages on this thread.

I always thought the $ was used for the shell prompt as a persistent reminder that time on the system costs money: As process accounting will assist in your monthly billing.

Bill Corcoran

On Aug 8, 2018, at 4:20 PM, Gilles Gravier <gilles at gravier.org<mailto:gilles at gravier.org>> wrote:

Caveat emptor: I haven't read all the messages on this thread. :)

But... I remember the VMS prompt being "$"... maybe some ancestry since VMS dates back to 1970?

Gilles

2018-08-08 17:20 GMT+02:00 Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu<mailto:jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>>:
    > From: Nemo

    > I will, no doubt, be flayed on this list but I tend to use "=>".

Hey, if it works for you, go for it.

After the Nth time I got confused as to exactly which machine I was
typing to, I hacked the shell on my V6 Unix to read its prompt from
".profile". (Very clean, only one added line of code in the existing
code.)

        Noel



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