This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: RE: Bash questions From: "Steven W. Orr" <steveo@world.std.com> Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 17:40:46 -0500 (EST) On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, Bill Carlson wrote: =>On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Stan Isaacs wrote: => =>> > The full comment in /etc/bashrc on my machine (RH6.0) is: =>> > =>> > # For some unknown reason bash refuses to inherit =>> > # PS1 in some circumstances that I can't figure out.B =>> > # Putting PS1 here ensures that it gets loaded every time. =>> > PS1="[\u@\h \W]\\$ " =>> > =>> > Sounds pretty clear to me. =>> =>> Thanks for quoting it for me. That's exactly the question I'm asking: =>> What is the "unknown reason"? Has anybody figured out the circumstances? =>> Then maybe I could decide if it's worth while to pull the setting out of =>> /etc/bashrc. =>> => =>I don't have an older box handy, but IIRC that comment has been there for =>quite a while, it might be an old bug in bash that whomever created the =>comment worked around rather than figure out. One could try commenting it =>out in /etc/bashrc and see what happens. => =>Bill Carlson => PS1 is a 'special' variable. If you export it it will not be inherited by child processes. Just set it in your .bashrc and all will be well. === Subject: RE: Bash questions From: "Steven W. Orr" <steveo@world.std.com> Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 17:41:48 -0500 (EST) Sorry, I forgot to tell you why PS1 will not export: You need to be able to test it in shell scripts to see if you are in an interactive shell. If it was exported, that mechanism would not work. ===