The Insanity In my job I have to ssh into a lot of servers to do preventive and routine maintenance. These servers tend to have a patch work of settings and configurations. During a shift I can touch Redhat, AIX, and HP-UX servers. These servers do not have a consistent prompt. Some show user@hostname $, others just display bash-#.#.#, and several are just a lonely $ devoid of any context to keep you from bricking the server or deleting HIPPA records.