Just a note about bold (and the many other tput video enhancements. The tput command is a Curses library interface that has it's roots in the Unix legacy of terminals. Back in the good old days (more than 20 years ago), there were dozens of terminals and manufacturers and not many agreed on the standards for character display. After all, the Unix console was originally a teletypewriter such as the ASR33 Teletype. A bold character was creating by printing a character, then backspacing and printing again, making the ink darker on the paper.
When the 'glass Teletype' became a reality around 1970, the concept of a hard-copy terminal required rework to match the paper effects that were in common usage. With only two colors (black and white/green/orange), something like bold had to emulated, usually with inverse video (dark letters on a light backgrounds). Underlining was also common, but glass tty's could also blink characters. And as the terminals became smarter, enhancements could be combined (bold + underline + blink). HP pioneered the smart terminal category with the 2640A and had the brightest characters (due to half-dot shifting), wide-screens (today = HDTV), and many video enhancements. The 2640A was the first implementation of the HP escape codes which would eventually become the base for the PCL printer language.
Other manufacturers, primarily DEC and Wyse, proceeded to develop their own terminal escape sequences with varied implementation techniques for the visual on the screen. The Curses library continued development to encompass all these features. To see the rich features available today, see the man pages for terminfo, tput, untic.
Almost no one uses terminals anymore. Instead, they are using PCs (which are not terminals) running some sort of terminal emulator. WRQ was one of the first companies to create a terminal emulator that could connect colors to various video enhancements. Later, other emulators would add colors and enhancements.
All this is background to why bold is not 'standard' across different emulators, and with emulator settings, can be different with the same emulator.
Another point of view about directories (especially Java): putting the entire directory path in the prompt can be really annoying. Usually, you need just the current directory and perhaps the parent (I like parent+current). I developed a customizable .profile snippet to handle the 3 most useful parts of a prompt: hostname, username and path. In the attached snippet, you can select one, two or all 3 fields and the enhancement to use for each field.
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
