Re: Screen Corruption when browsing Command History with Custom Prompt

[Ashley Wilson]

The escape sequence for adding colors are an exception - If you add
backslashes to those brackets, it won't (and doesn't) work as
expected.

I tried what you said : Set

           PS1 =  "\n\e\[0;31m\u: \w\n# \e\[m"

The resulting prompt did, still, exhibit the corruption explained in
my bug report, and the prompt appeared as follows:

           0;31mroot: /home/ash
           #

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * *

It seems I shouldn't have used the \e character.. The default Ubuntu
.bashrc has another way of doing it, which I tried to learn from. And
it seems it works! Here is my working sequence (and no screen
corruption!)

           PS1="\n\[\033[0;31m\]\u: \w\n# \[\033[00m\]"

Note that not all square brackets are preceded with backslashes!

Thanks for replying anyway. I was only trying to copy-paste from the
web, but overlooked the example that was already in the default
.bashrc !!

Sorry for the trouble..

--
Regards,
 Ashley.


On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:49 PM, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> Ashley Wilson wrote:
>
>> Repeat-By:
>>
>>        Set a custom prompt using the PS1 variable as follows:
>>
>>                PS1="\n\e[0;31m\u: \w\n# \e[m"
>>
>>        Then, browse command history using up/down keys.
>
> As the documentation states, you need to bracket sequences of non-printing
> characters in prompt strings with the \[ and \] escape sequences.
>
> Chet
>
>