Re: Length of %? in prompt

[Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>]

Ian Lynagh wrote:
> If the length of %? will alter the number of dashes following it in my
> prompt am I right in thinking that my only course of action is to
> enumerate the (rather large!) set of possible cases with
> "%(n?,---...,)"? If so I guess I will have to redesign  :-(

I haven't understood quite what you're trying to do, but you might be
able to use truncation.

  "%10>>anything%>>something else"

will limit `anything', whatever it expands to (it can include arbitrary
prompt escapes but also any other text), to 10 characters, truncating on
ther right.  Truncation is then turned off so that `something else' will
be output in full.  So to keep the length the same you can arrange for
`anything' to end with an arbitrarily large string of characters which
will be pruned to the right size.

This assumes zsh 4.  The truncation in older versions was less flexible
--- only the replacement text for prompt escapes was truncated.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 392070


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