Ten thousand and counting

A discussion this morning at work caused me to tally up how much I've spent on computers in my life.  Despite using computers for 30 years (25 of it as a professional programmer), I was somewhat surprised at how much I've spent.  My co-workers, however, were surprised how little I've spent.

Coloring a bash command prompt

Bash, the Bourne Again SHell, is the default command shell used for most Linux distributions and MacOS.  One of the nice things about it (and most Unix shells, for that matter) is the flexibility you have in configuring the command prompt.  When using a color-capable terminal program, I like to make the command prompt a slightly different color than the rest of the text in that window, just so it stands out when I skim backward through miles of output.  There's a couple different methods for doing that, and not all of them work well.  Here's the best method I've found.