Re: for a beginner...

["B. Douglas Hilton" <doug.hilton@engineer.com>]

As an adendum, here is a relevant portion of my Linux
profile which gives me a nice colorized prompt. Add
it to your .bash_profile or .bashrc

Keep in mind that wherever you see ESC, with the vi
editor you should press CTRL-V ESC to embed an
actual escape character into the sequence

PS1='\[ESC[1;30m\]<\[ESC[35m\]\#\[ESC[30m\]>(\[ESC[36m\]\h\[ESC[30m\])[\[ESC[34m\]`pwd`\[ESC[30m\]]\[ESC[32m\]

$\[ESC[0m\] '


A b/w version of your prompt will be:

<13>(thunder)[/home/doug]
$

the 13 will be purple, the thunder will be bright cyan, the /home/doug will be blue,
the $ will be green, and everything  else will be bright black. Any text you type will be grey.

Regards,
- Doug