I'm debugging some bash scripts and reading the scripts that come as part of Squeeze installation. I find several places where there are statements the set a value from variable PS1, BUT all of them seem to be in scripts that only get executed if PS1 is already non-empty. i.e. they are after a statement [ -z "$PS1" ] && return which, I think, executes return if PS1 is empty.
A related question: The comment just before the above line of code is: "# If not running interactively, don't do anything" For me, the implication of this comment is that a non-empty PS1 IS the defining characteristic of 'running interactively', but I would have thought 'interactive' should be characterized by having a tty attached to sysin and sysout for communication to a 'user'. I can imagine that a non-empty PS1 is used as an indicator, in which case whatever code that actually sets up the tty also sets PS1 to some minimal non-empty value like a single space or a dot, but is this actually the way it works, and where is it? Where can I read about these issues? Puzzled. -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100820223632.gb2...@big.lan.gnu
