On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 09:47:56PM -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > 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.
The subtlty of the difference depends on the length of your
prompt. With a one character prompt, the difference is
glaring - 100% of the string. I tend to colour the root
prompt differently to make it even more obvious.
> 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.
I've never met a bash that displays anything other than '#'
for '\$' in PS1. Can you give an example of one that does?
In terms of other shells, '#' is so common that one can
reasonably expect a reader to understand what it is trying
to denote. If in doubt, be explicit in your preamble.
Alas I do not have immediate access to esoteric UNIX systems
anymore, but a quick check of bash, zsh, csh, tcsh, ksh,
posh, dash, psh with Debian indicates that psh and sash do
not use '#' ('%' and '>' respectively); sh, csh,
bash, tcsh and ksh on Solaris all use '#'.
--
Jon Dowland
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