On 10/10/2012 3:48 PM, James B. Byrne wrote:
To clarify the situation. The ONLY difference in the shell setup for both root and an ordinary user is the name. As shown below they bith use the same shell, they both have exactly the same contents in .bashrc and .bash_profile. The file .profile exists for neither. And yet somehow they end up with totally different PS1 values.
How this happens I wish to discover. Where is root getting its PS1 value set and why is root's prompt surrounded by []? The ordinary user's PS1 value is that of the bash default which indicates to me that it is not being set anywhere.
There is a good deal of code given over to setting the PS1 value in /etc/bashrc but it seems to depend upon PS1 being already set. I can find no reference to PS1 in any file in/root and the oly reference in /etc/profile.d is in colorls.sh which seems to be testing PS1 for a zero length string (i.e unset value).
Where is PS1 actually being set?
sh-4.1$ which sh /bin/sh sh-4.1$ su -l Password: [root@vhost04 ~]# which sh /bin/sh [root@vhost04 ~]# diff .bashrc /home/byrnejb/.bashrc [root@vhost04 ~]# diff .bash_profile /home/byrnejb/.bash_profile [root@vhost04 ~]# ll .profile ls: cannot access .profile: No such file or directory [root@vhost04 ~]# ll /home/byrnejb/.profile ls: cannot access /home/byrnejb/.profile: No such file or directory [root@vhost04 ~]# [root@vhost04 ~]# echo $PS1 [\u@\h \W]$ [root@vhost04 ~]# exit logout sh-4.1$ echo $PS1 \s-\v$ sh-4.1$
It doesn't matter where sh is pointing. What matters is the shell configuration.
I'm using bash here: $ which sh /bin/sh $ echo $SHELL /bin/bash
So try 'echo $SHELL' instead of 'which sh' to see which shell you are using.
You can also look at the passwd file to see which shell is set.