

 in Your System Prompt - ricny046
http://www.bbs-software.com/blog/2013/08/03/%EF%A3%BF-in-your-system-prompt/

======
linohh
U+F8FF is the last code-point of the private use zone. Appearance of the
character is entirely random and depends on the font in use. Don't use it for
anything outside of an environment you can control. For me it's displayed as a
rectangle with F8FF in it, because I'm using Linux, which surprisingly does
not ship fonts with the Apple logo in it ;)

~~~
rabidcoder
Ubuntu Mono font has an Apple logo in it.

------
lelf
Yes, and you can have “💩” in your prompt. Wait, you won't believe it, but you
can even have “$” in your prompt! It is worth a blog post (in first page of
HN)?

~~~
reginaldjcooper
Apple's fucking emoticons. I had to jailbreak and install a whitelist
specifically because of the emoticon SMS spam.

~~~
lelf
They've been in Unicode since 6.0. And they are not much Apple's in the first
place.

~~~
reginaldjcooper
Yes. Apple renders them as little colorful pictures.

------
ne0phyte
At least provide a screenshot. You even linked to a page saying that you
should never use that character on a website.

It's a rectangle for me as well.

------
jlgaddis
Several years ago, while being logged into and working on several remote Linux
servers simultaneously, I rebooted the wrong one.

I realized it approximately .002 milliseconds after pressing <Enter> (after
"shutdown -r now") but it was too late.

Since then, I use one style of prompt on my personal machines and other non-
critical hosts. On production/critical machines, I use a different style of
prompt that stands out quite a bit and includes the hostname in all caps.

It seems simple (and it is) but it has done the job of keeping me from
rebooting a critical production machine during the middle of the day.

~~~
drummer32
You are gonna loooove molly-guard then.

Although the different prompt style for remote systems is still handy, cause
there's tons of other stuff you can do accidentaly that could cause damage.

------
lubomir
Seems to be down. Google cache version
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?biw=1256&bih=91...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?biw=1256&bih=914&sclient=psy-
ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbs-
software.com%2Fblog%2F2013%2F08%2F03%2F%25EF%25A3%25BF-in-your-system-
prompt%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbs-
software.com%2Fblog%2F2013%2F08%2F03%2F%25EF%25A3%25BF-in-your-system-
prompt%2F&gs_l=hp.3..0j0i46j46l2j0l2.5876.7663.0.7949.7.7.0.0.0.0.126.459.4j1.5.0....2...1c.1j2.23.psy-
ab..2.5.442.0vLBQj-GEI4&pbx=1)

Edit: alive again

------
fleeno
Under OSX I use the Emoji characters to indicate what server I'm on, and I use
the red police light character if it's a production machine.

You can also tell iTerm to report its terminal type as something specific,
then do something like this in your bashrc to setup a different prompt if
you're not on OSX:

if [ $TERM = "xterm-256color" ]; then

------
skriticos2
Private use Unicode block.. for me it shows a box only, though it would be
cool to have the Klingon symbol:

[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/f8ff/index.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/f8ff/index.htm)

------
angelortega
Why would I want a square in my prompt?

~~~
txutxu
To tell you that there is encoding (or font) problems in your setup before it
turns into a real issue. (?)

~~~
dualogy
TIL I have an encoding or font problem by not using Mac OS X..

------
syncerr
Reminds me of "put a burger in your shell".

[http://notes.torrez.org/2013/04/put-a-burger-in-your-
shell.h...](http://notes.torrez.org/2013/04/put-a-burger-in-your-shell.html)

