11.12. Having the Prompt Ignored on Cut and Paste

This one is weird but cool. Rory Toma < rory at corp dot webtv dot net > wrote to suggest a prompt like this: : rory@demon ; . How is this useful? You can triple click on any previous command (in Linux, anyway) to highlight the whole line, then paste that line in front of another prompt and the stuff between the ":" and the """ is ignored, like so:

: rory@demon ; uptime
  5:15pm  up 6 days, 23:04,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
: rory@demon ; : rory@demon ; uptime
  5:15pm  up 6 days, 23:04,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

The prompt is a no-op, and if your PS2 is set to a space, multiple lines can be cut and pasted as well.