Broken Bash Prompt

Ran into an interesting issue today – made a change to root’s .bashrc, logged out, logged back in and… Broken system.

Initial login was sucessful, the ‘Last logged in…’ line displayed, but after that nothing but a blinking cursor. Commands could be entered, but nothing would execute, and no bash prompt was seen.

The problem was quickly fixed with a strategic rsync, but let this be a lesson:

If you’re messing with root’s bash prompt, either test it on a non-root user, or open a second session to test. I was quite taken aback by this, because it didn’t dawn on me that it was possible to break bash to such a degree via a simple prompt modification.