Longer commands and strange behaviour on ksh


 
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# 1  
Old 03-27-2008
Longer commands and strange behaviour on ksh

Hi,
I was trying to customize this archaic HP-UX box. only shell available is ksh and that too seems to be pretty old and doesn't completely conform to what I read on the web about ksh. Anyway here are my issues:

- I wanted to have a dynamic title on xterm or dtterm. I put the following lines in my .kshrc:
PS1='ESC]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD}BEL${HOSTNAME}$ '

I had to spend hours to get the correct sequence for the ESC and BEL but finally got it working and works like charm.

However what happens now is on the command line whenever I enter a longer command even if its on the same line the "<" appears halfway and I can't see the whole command. Not sure why because the default screen itself has many many characters left on the side and it shouldn't be the case any idea how to fix it.

2. I wanted to customize the arrow keys which I was able to but couldn't do any thing with the home, end and pgup pgdn keys and command completions using tab (not escape escape) note the bind key for the tab completions doesn't work.

for the arrow keys following are working but don't know what to do about the home & end keys (^a & ^e are the keystrokes which are actually working right now as home and end. However if I press home and end keys they work more like pgup & pgdn keys.

arrow key customizations (in case someone wants to use them) - got it from web:
set -o emacs
alias __A=$(print '\0020') # ^P = up = previous command
alias __B=$(print '\0016') # ^N = down = next command
alias __C=$(print '\0006') # ^F = right = forward a character
alias __D=$(print '\0002') # ^B = left = back a character

Please help. Thanks in advance.
Anu
# 2  
Old 03-27-2008
The shell tries to figure out when it needs to wrap lines, and the non-printable stuff in your prompt counts towards that, because it doesn't know it's non-printable. Bash has a \[ \] sequence which you can use to tell the shell that something is not printable, but I doubt an old version of ksh would have that.

Sorry, can't help with the Home and End keys. If you can get the raw key codes then the rest should not be too awkward.
# 3  
Old 03-27-2008
no problem... I'm working on the home and end keys .. will post when I find something.
On the wrapping the commands ... makes sense ... so the solution could be not to modify the prompt ... or let the shell know that start wrapping after say 132 chars and not 80.
or is there a better way to change the xterm title dynamically?
Thanks for your note.
Anurag
 
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