Tiny but annoying problem regarding PS1 prompt appearance after tweaking

Andramalech · 04-08-2010, 03:32 AM

Hi,

I often have long outputs to the terminal and to make my life easier I have decided to tweak the prompt to appear bold with the export line below:

Code:

export PS1='\033[1m\u@`hostname`:\w>\033[0m '

This seemed to do the trick, the prompt is bold indeed.. However if a command line is long, especially if one browses between old commands with the up and down keys the appearance of the prompt line gets screwed. Below is an example where a long line writes over the prompt instead of a new line.

Code:

ufuk@office2:~/Documents/OWL tools/chibe> ^C
BIOPAX.owl 2:~/Documents/OWL tools/chibe> ./ChiBE.sh ~/Documents/Test\ files/CPATH-580499-B

Any idea what the problem might be?

Vrajgh · 04-08-2010, 09:30 AM

It is a good idea to wrap non printing characters between \[ and \] so that the shell is able to calculate the length of the prompt and hence wrap the lines correctly.

Code:

export PS1='\[\033[1m\]\u@`hostname`:\w>\[\033[0m\] '