Bradley M Alexander (storm@tux.org) had the excellent idea of reminding his users what kind of connection they were using to his machine(s), so he colour-codes prompts dependent on connection type. Here's the bashrc he supplied to me:
# /etc/bashrc # System wide functions and aliases # Environment stuff goes in /etc/profile # For some unknown reason bash refuses to inherit # PS1 in some circumstances that I can't figure out. # Putting PS1 here ensures that it gets loaded every time. # Set up prompts. Color code them for logins. Red for root, white for # user logins, green for ssh sessions, cyan for telnet, # magenta with red "(ssh)" for ssh + su, magenta for telnet. THIS_TTY=tty`ps aux | grep $$ | grep bash | awk '{ print $7 }'` SESS_SRC=`who | grep $THIS_TTY | awk '{ print $6 }'` SSH_FLAG=0 SSH_IP=`echo $SSH_CLIENT | awk '{ print $1 }'` if [ $SSH_IP ] ; then SSH_FLAG=1 fi SSH2_IP=`echo $SSH2_CLIENT | awk '{ print $1 }'` if [ $SSH2_IP ] ; then SSH_FLAG=1 fi if [ $SSH_FLAG -eq 1 ] ; then CONN=ssh elif [ -z $SESS_SRC ] ; then CONN=lcl elif [ $SESS_SRC = "(:0.0)" -o $SESS_SRC = "" ] ; then CONN=lcl else CONN=tel fi # Okay...Now who we be? if [ `/usr/bin/whoami` = "root" ] ; then USR=priv else USR=nopriv fi #Set some prompts... if [ $CONN = lcl -a $USR = nopriv ] ; then PS1="[\u \W]\\$ " elif [ $CONN = lcl -a $USR = priv ] ; then PS1="\[\033[01;31m\][\w]\\$\[\033[00m\] " elif [ $CONN = tel -a $USR = nopriv ] ; then PS1="\[\033[01;34m\][\u@\h \W]\\$\[\033[00m\] " elif [ $CONN = tel -a $USR = priv ] ; then PS1="\[\033[01;30;45m\][\u@\h \W]\\$\[\033[00m\] " elif [ $CONN = ssh -a $USR = nopriv ] ; then PS1="\[\033[01;32m\][\u@\h \W]\\$\[\033[00m\] " elif [ $CONN = ssh -a $USR = priv ] ; then PS1="\[\033[01;35m\][\u@\h \W]\\$\[\033[00m\] " fi # PS1="[\u@\h \W]\\$ " export PS1 alias which="type -path" alias dir="ls -lF --color" alias dirs="ls -lFS --color" alias h=history |