Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: UNIX prompts (-ksh)
Message-ID: <2391@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 26 Mar 89 17:50:15 GMT
References: <18805@adm.BRL.MIL> <11080@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.unix.questions
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 18

In article <11080@well.UUCP> tneff@well.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>Actually not even the classic Korn shell solution of
>
>	export PS1='$PWD> '
>
>seems to work everywhere.  On about half the machines I visit, if you
>try this you get a literal prompt of $PWD> -- i.e., the string isn't
>interpreted before display.  I have never been too scientific about why
>this is, since it's not all that important to me, but I think most of
>the trouble has been on BSD implementations of ksh.  Perhaps there's
>something in the BSD port that broke this.

I don't know ksh, but all the other shells I've seen use single-quotes
to protect against variable substitution...

				--Blair
				  '$WITTICISM'
				  "Oops."