Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2016 21:56:05 -0400 From: James E Keenan <jkeen@verizon.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: $PS1 does not render command-line prompt in color in a FreeBSD VM Message-ID: <d2b31340-dac9-fb6a-ba31-1ec8ac3707e2@verizon.net>
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This question concerns display of colors in the command-line prompt on two different FreeBSD installations. For a couple of months I have been using VirtualBox 5.1.2 to run FreeBSD-10.3 as a guest on an Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS host. When working in this VM I have been trying to avoid Linuxisms so as to better learn how to work in a BSD environment. One case: I'm using Bourne shell rather than Bash as the shell for my own user. In my .shrc file, I have this assignment for the spelling and color of my command-line prompt: PS1="[^[[31m\W^[[0m] \$ " ... where in each of two cases the '^[' is the ESCAPE character \033. This produces a prompt which I can verbally describe as: open-bracket in white; basename of pwd in red; close-bracket, space, dollar-sign, space in white ... which in the terminal looks like: [jkeenan] $ where 'jkeenan' is in red and all the rest is in white. So far so good. Yesterday I installed FreeBSD-11 as a VM on the same Linux host -- only this time I switched to using VMWare to house the VM. I brought over my .profile, .shrc, .vimrc, etc., files from the 10.3 VM to this new one. I expected them to Just Work. However the terminal inside the VMWare console seems to be unable to digest the codes for color in the assignment to $PS1. That value for $PS1 is rendering as: [[31mjkeenan[0m] $ ... all rendered in white; nothing in red. The control sequences to change from white to red and back again are simply being literally displayed. I should note that the VMWare console is perfectly capable of rendering different colors. Vim gets nice colors in syntax highlighting for both sh and perl. Does anyone have a clue as to why $PS1 DWIMs on FreeBSD-10.3 in VirtualBox while FreeBSD-11.0 does not in VMWare? Thank you very much. Jim Keenan
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