Smile in the terminal prompt

[Atom Powers]

On 5/15/06, Salvatore <salm at freemail.it> wrote:
> Hi,
> my terminal (bash) prompt is:
>
> PS1='\e[0;31m\]\e[7m[\h - \u] [\w]\e[m\]\e[27m\n[\!]$ '
>
> After upgrading to freebsd 6.1, the prompt looks different:
> - it shows two smiles at both end of the first line and the red
> background is white.

The smile face is the graphical representation of one of the special
ascii characters (characters #00 through #30); I don't remember
exactly which one. So it seems your prompt is printing the the graphic
of the special character instead of printing the character's function.

> Does that happens to you too if you set the prompt above?
> I know that the prompt is wrong (it lacks the start invisible chars \[;
> a better version could be PS1='\[\e[1;37m\]\[\e[41m\][\h - \u]
> [\w]\[\e[0m\]\n[\!]$ '),
> but WHY before the upgrade it looked right and now it shows these smiles?

Maybe your shell changed, or your term setting, or your font? My first
guess would be the term setting. For some reason or another your
teminal is reading a special character from your PS1 setting and
printing the graphic of that character.


-- 
--
Perfection is just a word I use occasionally with mustard.
--Atom Powers--