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Do not use redirection characters in your shell prompt

(tanelpoder.com)
217 points tanelpoder | 3 comments | 17 Mar 21 14:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.638s | source
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teddyh ◴[17 Mar 21 17:28 UTC] No.26494310[source]▶
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
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1. JdeBP ◴[18 Mar 21 00:29 UTC] No.26498505[source]▶
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>
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2. teddyh ◴[18 Mar 21 09:14 UTC] No.26500812[source]▶
I wrote “normal”, not ”default”. Almost every autoexec.bat file I saw in the wild contained “prompt $p$g”.
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3. JdeBP ◴[18 Mar 21 21:24 UTC] No.26507715[source]▶
You didn't see very many, then. There were lots of people who didn't have that.