[adelie-users] Re: weird characters in terminal

On Wed Jul 01 01:54 PM, wastelander1972(a)gmail.com wrote: > Running KDE DE and after entering the su command, I have an > unreadable > name as root user: > > jordan on Adelie-BC80D0 ~ % su > Password: > %n on %B%F{white}%m%f%b %~ %B%F{green}%#%f%b apk update > > I have the default regional settings enabled, and the encoding in > konsole is set to UTF-8. Any help? Thanks. This is unrelated to UTF-8 but rather the various shells in play. The default user interactive shell we use is zsh, but the default root shell (except for the live CD) is /bin/sh, which is a symlink to dash for some time now. What's happening here is when you run "su", the prompt variable $PS1 is being retained in the environment from your user's zsh session, and it contains a bunch of zsh-specific escapes that dash doesn't understand, so it just prints them literally (and thus the prompt looks really weird). Typically my advice is that you should always login as root using "su -" instead of "su", the difference being the new shell will be run as a "login shell" (/etc/profile and ~/.profile will be sourced) and the environment will be cleared properly. You should then get a nice simple "<hostname> #" prompt in that case from our default /etc/profile. This is applicable to anywhere you use the "su" command to login as root, or even as another user ("su - user" instead of "su user"). Max