Line breaks in bash

Igor Pechtchanski pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Thu Apr 29 22:52:00 GMT 2004


On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> > From: Andrew DeFaria
> > Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 1:18 PM
> > To: cygwin<at>cygwin<dot>com
> > Subject: Re: Line breaks in bash
> >
> > When I type a long line in the bash shell it seems to get confused when
> > it passes the first 80 character barrier and does a newline. Below is an
> > example.
> >
> > C09-272-A:# why is it in bash that when I get close to typing 80
> > characters bash
> > does som
> > ething like this?
> >
> > Now set my prompt to the hostname as
> > "\[\e]0;\w\a\e[01;33mC09-272-A:\e[0m". Could this be causing the problem?
>
> Maybe you are missing a \] in the prompt.  What you really want is something
> like this:
> "\[\e]0;\w\a\e[01;33m\]C09-272-A:\[\e[0m\]"

Any sequence of non-printable characters should be enclosed in '\['..'\]'
for bash to not count it towards the current length of the line.

> (What are \w and \a doing?  man bash says that they should be the current
> working directory and a bell, but they don't act like that in this prompt
> for me.)

'\e]0;' will set the window title to the string that follows it (up to a
'\a', so that's the terminator).  So, the above should set the window
title to the current working directory, and the prompt will be displayed
as "C09-272-A:".  If you wanted the current working directory displayed in
the prompt, you could use "\[\e[01;33m\]C09-272-A:\w:\[\e[0m\]" instead.
	Igor
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