Info on BRL shell

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <12192 at steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen at crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <8473 at smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>| If the super-user's $PS1 does not end in "# ", it is appended as a
>| safety reminder.
>God save me from people who assume that I'm so stupid that I don't know
>how to set up a shell prompt, and who mess with my environment variables.

That feature was in the BRL Bourne shell before I got here and they
insisted on leaving it in when I upgraded to a more recent base shell.
The default timeout for the super-user is also much less than for
normal users.  If one didn't have to become super-user very often,
this stuff wouldn't be necessary.  But it does come in handy for
improved system security; in our multi-window networked environment it
is easy to forget that one has a privileged window on some system,
unless there is some visible reminder.

The added-"# " feature is #ifdef BRL so you can avoid it if you don't
like it.  In fact non-BRL sites are advised to omit -DBRL from the
Makefile to disable all local "administrative policy" decisions built
into the shell.  The notes I posted should have said that the feature
is optional; I'll take your complaint as an action item for the notes.