I'm a new NetBSD user and have just installed NetBSD 1.3.2 on my
SparcStation 2.  Although I'm really loving it (it makes much better use of
that hardware than SunOS 4.1.4, and I'm looking forward to next getting my
Sun 3/80 up and running), there's one quirk that is annoying the heck outta
me.

I am a ksh user, and I've got a fairly standard .profile/.kshrc pair that I
use on almost all Unix boxes I'm on.  One of the things that I like to do is
have a custom PS1 prompt that shows the hostname, current username, and pwd.
On my work systems, which are Solaris 2.x and SunOS 4.1.4, I came up with
the following:

PS1IDSTRING="($(hostname):$(whoami))"
PS1='${PS1IDSTRING} ${PWD} $ '

This works out very nicely, and I can do the following sort of things and
have the prompt follow along:

(bofh:devin) /home/devin $ cd public_html
(bofh:devin) /home/devin/public_html $ su root
Password:
(bofh:root) /home/devin/public_html $ telnet foo

SunOS 5.6 (foo)
Username: devin
Password:

(foo:devin) /home/devin $

When I try to process these statements in NetBSD, the shell will lock up, as
if its running an infinite loop.  I have to ^C to get the prompt back.
Putting echo statements in my .kshrc shows that everything is getting
executed up to these lines.  I've tried editing them, but there is no
combination that I've been able to find that allows the NetBSD ksh to update
each item in the prompt string as necessary.

Am I doing something wrong, is this a compatibility issue, or is there a
possible bug in the NetBSD ksh?

--
Devin L. Ganger
"And Hell does not always look like Hell.  On a good day, it can look
a lot like L.A."    -- Dr. Eugene Sands, _Playing God_