Shell prompt changed to >
 

Hello everyone,

Accidentally, I typed ls -l " at the prompt and suddenly the prompt changed to >.

I'm using a stripped back version of Ubuntu that only includes a command prompt on an Oracle VirtualBox. Unfortunately, I can't get the specific version since the prompt isn't working properly. Of course, I could restart and it would go back to normal, but I would rather do it without restarting.

Thanks.

You can enter the closing ", or just hit Ctrl+C.

You have opened a quote with typing " and the shell is waiting for you to close it, so just type " again and press Enter.
Alternatively just press Ctrl+c to abort the command.

Or you can use exit and login again. It will solve the pb.

Thanks everyone!

This will not work. The exit command will not be executed as long as the quote is not closed (if it is executed at all, in case of the OP it would not be executed even with a closed quote).

As described above, this happens when the shell is waiting for you to finish your command. You'll run into this if you try to execute a command with a lonely quote (single or double), a trailing backslash, or any number of other "incomplete" commands. All you have to do to fix it is close out whatever operation you were running (close the quote, or give the trailing backslash something to delimit, like a space), or just press Ctrl+C to cancel.

Nobody mentioned that it is called secondary prompt and its value is stored in the PS2 environment variable and you can customize it at your pleasure. :twocents:

Yeah, this was the first thing I tried...didn't work.

Thanks for the additional information, suicidaleggroll and colucix.