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

[Dutch Ingraham]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 01:09:50PM -0400, James E Keenan wrote:
> 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.

Just to confirm it has nothing to do with the transfer of the config files or
the VM, I have a similar $PS1 scheme, also using sh as my shell, and have the 
same problem after upgrading from 10.3 to 11; this all on bare metal upgraded 
in-place, no file transfers needed.

I haven't had time to debug yet, just wanted to get this out there to confirm
this is not a local issue.