Once upon a time, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com> said:
FWIW Haiku uses bash and has a prompt which changes colour
(green/red)
depending on whether the status code of the last command was good or
bad. I found this surprisingly useful. They use:
\[`if [ $? = 0 ]; then echo "\e[32m"; else echo "\e[31m";
fi`\]\w[\e[0m\]>
I've used something similar in my prompt for a while, making it bold if
the last command failed. I do it with:
# get "normal" and "emphasis" terminal entries
prompt_term[0]=$(tput sgr0)
prompt_term[1]=$(tput bold)
# make the prompt bold if the last command failed
PS1='\[${prompt_term[$(($??1:0))]}\]'"$PS1"'\[${prompt_term[0]}\]'
I will say though that getting into how the prompt looks can be highly
personalized bike-shedding. :) I haven't used the default Red Hat or
Fedora prompt basically ever IIRC (and I started with Red Hat with RHL
3.0.3, long before RHEL or Fedora).
--
Chris Adams <linux(a)cmadams.net>