On Sat, 23 Sep 2017 21:45:04 +0200
Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:

> Le 23/09/2017 à 20:20, Steve Litt a écrit :
> >> What a pity there isn't a visual indicator that you are weilding
> >> root authority like, I don't know, maybe the bash shell prompt
> >> ending character changing from "$" to "#".
> > That's not enough for me. When I open a terminal intended to be
> > either root or on a different machine, I open a terminal that's
> > white on red background. When I open a terminal intended to be me
> > on my local machine, it's black on white background. This has saved
> > me some pretty bad mistakes over the years.
> >
>

>      Means you must have one terminal profile for every location you
> ssh to. 

No it doesn't. If I'm sshed anywhere, it's a red background, same as if
I'm root. Basically, if my terminal is black on white, everything's
"business as usual." If it's white on dark red, watch out, check
everything, check twice.

> And you forbid yourself to use su or ssh from the command
> line, because this doesn't change the color scheme of the terminal.

No forbidding. I simply run a red terminal if I'm going to ssh. It's
perhaps a little discipline, but no biggy.

And now that you mention it, I could have shellscripts ssht and sut
that spawn a red terminal and then run the rest of the command on the
red terminal.

>

>      It's pretty heavy to manage all the necessary terminal profiles
> - I used gnome-terminal when I experimented with this method, a dozen
> years ago. I eventually found it complicated my life a lot.

I don't think I'm taking it as far as you did. I have two terminals:
black on white means "business as usual", while white on dark
red means BEWARE, WATCH OUT, DANGER, PELEGRO, ACHTUNG.

SteveT

Steve Litt
September 2017 featured book: Manager's Guide to Technical
Troubleshooting Brand new, second edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mgr