Re: regarding login prompt

[Dan Nelson <dnelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the last episode (Aug 15), Peter Stephenson said:
> Boyd Adamson wrote:
> > OT: Out of interest, why is it that zsh uses the % by convention? It
> > seems (as a relative newcomer) to be more rooted in the bourne shell
> > tradition, yet the % has historically been used by csh.
> 
> Zsh was originally written to make csh users feel at home in a ksh-like
> environment, so the interactive features that didn't affect scripting
> often looked a lot like csh.
> 
> It might well have been different if it were done now, but actually I'm
> quite happy with "%" since "\" is already rather overloaded in shells.

I think Boyd was asking about the default prompt character being % vs
$, not the format specifier within more complex prompt strings. 
Luckily, your first paragraph works as an explanation in either case :)

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx