Mac OS X bash prompt bug?

Question

I am trying to set my bash prompt to display the time and current directory in bold:

export PS1="\[\e[1m\][\A] \w \$ \[\e[0m\]"

This does apparently work, but when I use the command history (ctrl-r), after finding the command I was searching for and pressing enter, this line is not displayed correctly. Here is an example:

[21:58] ~/Wyona/svn-repos/zwischengas $ 
(reverse-i-search)`ta': tail -F logs/log4j-cnode1.log

becomes, after pressing enter:

[21:58] ~/Wyona/svn-repos/zwischengas $  -F logs/log4j-cnode1.log

Of course, this is not "really" a problem, since the command does work correctly, but it is still annoying. Does anybody know why this happens? And, more importantly, how to prevent/fix it?

Answer 1

I can reproduce this with the system bash on 10.5.0 through 10.6.4, and this appears to be a bug in bash 3.x.

see: http://osdir.com/ml/bug-bash-gnu/2009-07/msg00021.html

Install a new, more up to date bash (4.x) (my preferred path is Homebrew, found on github), and it should be fixed (it is for me).

Answer 2

I was seeing this, too, and fixed it by jumping into Preferences > Settings > [whichever one is your default] > Advanced and setting "Declare Terminal As" to "xterm-256color", then restarting Terminal.