On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 03:48:23PM -0400, 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? James, Have a look in /etc/bashrc (and scripts called from there, such as in /etc/profile.d). HTH, Dave