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Highlight Your Shell Prompt When Working as Root

linuxjournal.com — A useful thing that some distros have started doing is setting the color of your shell prompt differently if you're logged in as root. This gives you an additional visual cue that helps avoid doing things as root when you don't want to. If your distro doesn't do this for you, you can accomplish it by changing your .bashrc files.

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  • leszek, on 04/15/2008, -0/+1I tried this on Ubuntu and I still have a green prompt when I use "sudo bash" or "sudo -s" to be root.
    On the contrary, if I use "sudo su", it is red.
    In all those cases, pwd still point to my home directory.
  • Philluminati, on 04/15/2008, -0/+1Where the ***** did my comment go? I hit edit and got a "your comment doesn't exist" error message.

    What it said was that distros have been doing this for at least 10 years. This is something that even UNIX users used to do.

    If you log into Gnome with the root account you normally get a red desktop background as well so, looking across the office it's obvious you've left yourself logged in (or someone is using the root account).

    Here's a recent discussion on Reddit about what PS1 values people have and why they do it. http://reddit.com/info/697cu/comments/
  • Philluminati, on 04/15/2008, -0/+1"A useful thing that some distros have started doing..."

    ..about 10 years ago!

    If you log into Gnome using the root account you get often get a red desktop background as compared with the standard theme for regular users. This is so as you scan the office with your eyes you can see if you have left yourself logged in anywhere.

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