Info on BRL shell

[William E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <14670005 at hpsal2.HP.COM> morrell at hpsal2.HP.COM (Michael Morrell) writes:

| 	Sorry Bill, but I agree that putting a '#' at the end of the
| superuser prompt is A Good Thing.  I've often got a half dozen shells
| running in different windows; it's nice to be reminded which of them has
| been superuserized.

  The people who have superuser access hopefully are smart enough to be
able to handle reminding themselves without having a shell decide how
they should do it. I personally run a prompt which is in color and use a
special ugly color for root. Others do things like placing the current
machine and directory name in italics, etc.

  People who can't remind themselves shouldn't be playing in root. As
noted elsewhere, using su sets the prompt rather than hanging stuff on
it, and does it only once, before going interactive. Thus, if I do
	su -
to execute my profile, it can be reset by the profile to what I want.

  On the topic of protecting yourself, I have a number of logins for
other system maintenence, which run using the minimum set of access. a
'uumaint' for uucp, 'local' for the local commands partition, 'lpmaint',
etc. This allows many things to be done without using root (obviously
not all).
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me