Thanks. This makes a lot of sense.

Bart Schaefer wrote, On 02/02/2006 05:58 PM:

On Feb 2,  2:41pm, Zvi Har'El wrote:
}
} The explanation explains everything, except the percent sign. BTW,
} In my case, I see a reverse-video percent sign printed. What does it
} mean?

It means "this was the end of the output before the prompt was printed."
It's so that you can tell it was the shell that took over at that point,
rather than that some other process output something it wasn't meant to.
  

-- 
Dr. Zvi Har'El      mailto:rl@math.technion.ac.il    Department of Mathematics
tel:+972-54-4227607 icq:179294841    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
fax:+972-4-8293388  http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~rl/    Haifa 32000, ISRAEL
"If you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all." -- Thumper (1942)