Misbehaving Bash Prompt

**Randy Schilling** · November 6th, 2012

I added this command to my root .bashrc file to add color to my prompt
and to simplify its path portion to the lowest level directory,

Code:

export PS1="\e[1;31m\u@\h:\W\$\e[m "

and my bash prompt comes up ending with $ when I expected #.
Also, occasionally, when I enter a command, part of that command
becomes part of my prompt!
If the following is a prompt and command,

Code:

prompt$ command

then my prompt might come back as

Code:

prompt$ com

What's causing this strange behavior?
Please let me know if you need to see more of my .bashrc file.

Thanks for your help and grateful for this forum, Randy

**2F4U** · November 6th, 2012

It may be a copy/paste problem, but as far as I know, the double quotes should be replaced by single quotes. This site has a nice overview of how to design bash prompts:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...#Basic_prompts

**codemaniac** · November 6th, 2012

The below section might be informative for you in /etc/profile

Code:

if [ "$PS1" ]; then
  if [ "$BASH" ] && [ "$BASH" != "/bin/sh" ]; then
    # The file bash.bashrc already sets the default PS1.
    # PS1='\h:\w\$ '
    if [ -f /etc/bash.bashrc ]; then
      . /etc/bash.bashrc
    fi
  else
    if [ "`id -u`" -eq 0 ]; then
      PS1='# '
    else
      PS1='$ '
    fi
  fi
fi