This is a learning experience for me. I've come to know a fair bit about what can be done to create interesting and useful Bash Prompts, but I need your input to correct and improve this document. I no longer make code checks against older versions of Bash, let me know of any incompatibilities you find.
The latest version of this document should always be available at http://www.gilesorr.com/bashprompt/ (usually only in HTML format). The latest official release should always be at http://www.tldp.org/. Please check these out, and feel free to e-mail me at <giles at dreaming dot org> with suggestions.
I use the Linux Documentation Project HOWTOs almost exclusively in the HTML format, so when I convert this from DocBook SGML (its native format), HTML is the only format I check thoroughly. If there are problems with other formats, I may not know about them and I'd appreciate a note about them.
There are issues with the PDF and RTF conversions (as of December 2000), including big problems with example code wrapping around the screen and getting mangled. I always keep my examples less than 80 characters wide, but the PDF version seems to wrap around 60. Please use online examples if the code in these versions don't work for you. But they do look very pretty.