Tom Furie put forth on 2/10/2010 12:17 AM: > On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 11:22:03PM -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > >> Maybe you misunderstood my example shell prompt code. Or maybe I'm just not >> understanding what you're saying. Here, copy/pasted from a Putty terminal >> session. Not a doc-file, but demonstrates your example nonetheless. >> >> [11:14:14][s...@greer]/etc/postfix$ >> [11:16:09][r...@greer]/etc/postfix$ >> >> There. No color. Root does has a different prompt. The prompt says "root" >> instead of "user". What about your concern am I missing? > > I think the point is that it's a lot easier to overlook "root" buried > somewhere in the middle of a long prompt than it is to overlook a "#" > right next to the cursor.
An author of technical documentation should never rely on the ability of the reader to pick up on the subtle one character difference of $ or # in a command line example. Any command run by root should always be identified as such with additional text. Additionally, bash is the default shell on many *nix variants/distros, and far from all of them use # trailing the prompt to denote root is currently logged into the shell. If one is writing cross-platform or generic documentation, again, one should never rely on # or $ conveying to the reader what user is logged into the shell. Always be explicit when teaching the command line. -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
