I too have not seen all of the messages on this thread. I always thought the $ was used for the shell prompt as a persistent reminder that time on the system costs money: As process accounting will assist in your monthly billing. Bill Corcoran On Aug 8, 2018, at 4:20 PM, Gilles Gravier > wrote: Caveat emptor: I haven't read all the messages on this thread. :) But... I remember the VMS prompt being "$"... maybe some ancestry since VMS dates back to 1970? Gilles 2018-08-08 17:20 GMT+02:00 Noel Chiappa >: > From: Nemo > I will, no doubt, be flayed on this list but I tend to use "=>". Hey, if it works for you, go for it. After the Nth time I got confused as to exactly which machine I was typing to, I hacked the shell on my V6 Unix to read its prompt from ".profile". (Very clean, only one added line of code in the existing code.) Noel -- Gilles Gravier - Gilles@Gravier.org GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437 Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0x8DE6D026