On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 05:00:29PM +0800, Michaelll Lee wrote:
> By the way, apparently the content about "non-printing characters" in that
> man page has not been modified across the several versions of Bash, for
> example in my machine, "3.2.57(1)-release" and "5.1.0(1)-release" share
> nearly the same document for section "PROMPTING", and both of them have not
> mentioned about the necessity to wrap around the non-printing characters
> with "\[...\]".
It's in the list of backslash-escaped special characters:
abled. Bash allows these prompt strings to be customized by inserting
a number of backslash-escaped special characters that are decoded as
follows:
\a an ASCII bell character (07)
\d the date in "Weekday Month Date" format (e.g., "Tue May
26")
[...]
\\ a backslash
\[ begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could
be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the
prompt
\] end a sequence of non-printing characters
Remember also that the manual (either the texinfo version or the man page)
is written as a reference, not a tutorial. All of the information that
you need is in there, but it's not necessarily laid out in the way that's
best for learning it from a newcomer's point of view.
