A blank line before the unix prompt?

[spenser aden]

In article <6591 at bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, ilham at athena.mit.edu (Ilhamuddin Ahmed) writes:
| In article <3809 at okstate.UUCP> Ashok writes 
| >
| >My objective
| >is to print a blank line before a prompt to improve clarity of the output
| >from the previous unix command. The example follows:
| >	% ls
| >	  <output of "ls" command>
| >	% <blank line>
| >	% <now cursor is here>
| >
| >Will appreciate the response. Thanks!  -- Ashok
| 
| If you are using csh or tcsh then you can simply do this by adding the
| following in your .cshrc (or .tcshrc) or by manually typing it in 
| [Ugh :-] 
| 
| set prompt = "% \
| % "
| 
| Please note that there is no space after the '\'. This way, you can have
| multiple-line prompts.

This is interesting, and I would like to do something similar on my XENIX 386
machine, but I've got a problem.  I'd like to display the current directory
on the firrst line, and the csh history counter on the second line at the 
prompt.  Something like :

/usr2/spenser/bin
(15) _

In order to do this, I have to alias 'cd'.  I've tried this (and a few 
derivations of) in my .cshrc :  

alias cd 'cd \!* ; set prompt="[=5h"`pwd`"[=5l \
(\!) " '    # set prompt string

(If this is hard to read, I have "<esc>[=5h" and "<esc>[=5l" around the `pwd`)
And I have this 'set prompt' command by itself in my .login.  The escape
sequence simply places the directory name in half intensity.  This works fine
when I first login and until I try to 'cd' to any directory, but when I try
to 'cd' it says 'Unmatched "."' and the 'cd' fails.  I suspect that it's not 
able to carry the alias over to the second line using the \ method spelled 
out in the previous article, but how does one get an alias definition of this
sort to span two lines?  Sorry, I've tried to RTFM, but I can't find 'alias' in
the reference manual my company has provided me.

-- 
S. Spenser Aden - Ferranti International Controls Corporation - PO Box 5012 
Sugar Land, TX. 77487 ------ (713)274-5000 ------ tness1!sugar!ficc!spenser  
Any opinions expressed above, unless explicitly denoted, are mine alone and 
do not reflect those of my employer.  My wife won't claim them either ...