 in Your System Prompt

http://www.bbs-software.com/blog/2013/08/03/%EF%A3%BF-in-your-system-prompt/

by ricny046 • 13 years ago

9 17 13 years ago

linohh• 13 years ago

U+F8FF is the last code-point of the private use zone. Appearance of the character is entirely random and depends on the font in use. Don't use it for anything outside of an environment you can control. For me it's displayed as a rectangle with F8FF in it, because I'm using Linux, which surprisingly does not ship fonts with the Apple logo in it ;)

rabidcoder• 13 years ago

Ubuntu Mono font has an Apple logo in it.

ne0phyte• 13 years ago

At least provide a screenshot. You even linked to a page saying that you should never use that character on a website.

It's a rectangle for me as well.

jlgaddis• 13 years ago

Several years ago, while being logged into and working on several remote Linux servers simultaneously, I rebooted the wrong one.

I realized it approximately .002 milliseconds after pressing <Enter> (after "shutdown -r now") but it was too late.

Since then, I use one style of prompt on my personal machines and other non-critical hosts. On production/critical machines, I use a different style of prompt that stands out quite a bit and includes the hostname in all caps.

It seems simple (and it is) but it has done the job of keeping me from rebooting a critical production machine during the middle of the day.

drummer32• 13 years ago

You are gonna loooove molly-guard then.

Although the different prompt style for remote systems is still handy, cause there's tons of other stuff you can do accidentaly that could cause damage.

glazskunrukitis• 13 years ago

This has happened far too many times for me too. A colored/distinct prompt is a must.

lubomir• 13 years ago

Seems to be down. Google cache version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?biw=1256&bih=91...

Edit: alive again

angelortega• 13 years ago

Why would I want a square in my prompt?

txutxu• 13 years ago

To tell you that there is encoding (or font) problems in your setup before it turns into a real issue. (?)

dualogy• 13 years ago

TIL I have an encoding or font problem by not using Mac OS X..

lelf2• 13 years ago

Yes, and you can have “💩” in your prompt. Wait, you won't believe it, but you can even have “$” in your prompt! It is worth a blog post (in first page of HN)?

reginaldjcooper2• 13 years ago

Apple's fucking emoticons. I had to jailbreak and install a whitelist specifically because of the emoticon SMS spam.

lelf2• 13 years ago

They've been in Unicode since 6.0. And they are not much Apple's in the first place.

skriticos2• 13 years ago

Private use Unicode block.. for me it shows a box only, though it would be cool to have the Klingon symbol:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/f8ff/index.htm

syncerr• 13 years ago

Reminds me of "put a burger in your shell".

http://notes.torrez.org/2013/04/put-a-burger-in-your-shell.h...

fleeno• 13 years ago

Under OSX I use the Emoji characters to indicate what server I'm on, and I use the red police light character if it's a production machine.

You can also tell iTerm to report its terminal type as something specific, then do something like this in your bashrc to setup a different prompt if you're not on OSX:

if [ $TERM = "xterm-256color" ]; then

 in Your System Prompt

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