From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu ([128.100.102.51]) by archone.tamu.edu with SMTP id <22533>; Mon, 26 Aug 1991 21:28:16 -0500 Received: from localhost by hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu with SMTP id <2702>; Mon, 26 Aug 1991 22:28:17 -0400 To: The rc Mailing List Subject: Re: early reaction(s) to rc In-reply-to: john's message of Fri, 23 Aug 91 09:40:03 -0400. <9108232340.26762.rc.bafoj@syd.dit.csiro.au> Date: Mon, 26 Aug 1991 21:28:14 -0500 From: Chris Siebenmann Message-Id: <91Aug26.222817edt.2702@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu> [This is part 1 of N parts of stuff; more to come as I digest and comment on my pile of email.] John writes: | This is what I fail to follow; I don't understand why one needs to tell | whether or not the shell is interactive in order to accomplish the goal | of making a root prompt be something arbitrary. Figuring out what the root prompt should be may take a significant number of (potentially expensive) operations; I'd like to do it only when necessary, to avoid the performance hit. In hindsight, setting the root prompt was a bad example of per-shell startup actions. A much better one for people with windowing systems is arranging a per-window history, something that is highly useful (especially for me, as just specifying a global history file seems to result in all sorts of interesting jumbling up of stuff). For X, one can almost get there cheaply with a prompt function, but it's not quite close enough (and going the final step is expensive; you need to check what your current tty is, which is not something I want to do for every prompt). - cks