$PS1 does not render command-line prompt in color in a FreeBSD VM

[James E Keenan]

On 10/12/2016 12:16 PM, Roger Pate wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 9:56 PM, James E Keenan <jkeen at verizon.net> wrote:
>> This question concerns display of colors in the command-line prompt on two
>> different FreeBSD installations.
>
>> ... 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.
>
> How did you "bring over" your files from one VM to the other?  Did
> your escape characters get stripped?  If they did, that would explain
> what you see.
>

The files were wrapped in a tarball and scp-ed.  The control characters 
in the assignment to PS1 did not get stripped.  I examined them via 'od 
-c' on each VM and the control character 033 is present where expected 
in both cases.

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan