Do not use redirection characters in your shell prompt

When I moved from DOS to Unix, I quickly got used to the default prompt of "$" instead of DOS’s default ">". Whenever I see ">" in someone’s custom prompt I assume they are DOS or Windows people who couldn’t get used to change when they started using Unix-like systems.

(This is how normal DOS and Unix command prompts looked, for reference:)

    C:\DOS> chkdsk c:

    server$ vmstat

Makes sense, but weirdly I did not follow that route. I started on Unix, then learned about DOS, did not use it much, but I did switch my Unix prompt to use '> ', because I liked it better. The default '$' has too much visual clutter for me. BUT, when I post snippets of shell commands on the web, I use '$ ' because most people are familiar with it.

">" prompts aren't that uncommon outside of DOS, though

    $ telnet
    telnet> 

    $ irb
    irb(main):001:0>

    $ echo look at me i'm an unterminated string
    >

I guess python's ">>>" prompt is more robust against accidentally being interpreted as a redirection, at least.

No. That's what DOS prompts looked like for people who knew how to alter them from the default, or who used quite late versions of DOS. The default prompt in COMMAND was $n$g not $p$g .

   A>

I wrote “normal”, not ”default”. Almost every autoexec.bat file I saw in the wild contained “prompt $p$g”.

You didn't see very many, then. There were lots of people who didn't have that.