Is "$" symbol still necessary in the command lines?

[Leo Iannacone]

Hi all!

I was looking at packaging guide html version (merging topic)[1], and I found each "command line" comes after a "$" symbol.

I know that we/you use that as "a convention", and that's true. As far as I know "$" and "#" have been used in the past to make distinction between commands run by user and cmds run by root, but (using sudo for having root permissions) do you think "$" is still necessary?...

I mean, you will have the symbol ever... also in commands coming with sudo (that's why "the user runs sudo" , and user is "$"), so it seems to be really redundant.

Another think I would like to put to your attention is:
Try to image a "new user" comes, he's not a developer and he does not feel comfortable with the terminal, I think he will very appreciate the possibility to "copy/paste" commands in a really fast way, that's now seems to be a little tricky due to the "$" presence, indeed you cannot "double-clic" on the line to get full text-selection.

Have a great day!

Leo.

[1] - http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/udd-merging.html

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

I think it's still necessary, and we should keep the commands which have it.