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I observed that my custom bash prompt does not work on mc. How do I customize it?

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WHere do you set your custom bash prompt? – Mark Nov 23 '12 at 13:43
My custom bash prompt is setup in .bash_profile – Sorin Sbarnea Nov 23 '12 at 14:01

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

The issue is that .bash_login files are only read when bash is run as the login shell. mc probably just calls a new shell which will read its startup from ~/.bashrc See bash documentation for details.

To make the shell run in a common way it is often suggested that you call .bashrc from .bash_login e.g.

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
   source ~/.bashrc
fi
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I did this and now I see the prompt correctly, still there is a difference: all ANSI escapes had vanished from mc prompts, it's not colored. – Sorin Sbarnea Nov 23 '12 at 15:16
I suspect $TERM has been changed as man mc says it is " run it in a pseudo terminal," – Mark Nov 24 '12 at 0:39
up vote -1 down vote

Read the INVOCATION section of the man page, it's there for a reason. MC is most likely not launching a login shell and you are only configuring your prompt for login shells.

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Excerpt from man mc: "An extra added feature of using the subshell is that the prompt displayed by the Midnight Commander is the same prompt that you are currently using in your shell." - As you probably observed this is not true, the prompt is clearly not the same, in fact I suspect it's the default prompt for bash bash-3.2$. – Sorin Sbarnea Nov 19 '12 at 9:47

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