Guidelines for styling shell prompt code examples
A shell is a program that waits for you to type in a command and then press the return key. To indicate which commands you should type, content on MDN Web Docs lists them in a code block, similar to code examples. Such a block looks like this:
bash
# This may take a while...
hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ firefox
cd firefox
The following guidelines cover how to write Shell prompt code examples for MDN Web Docs.
General guidelines for shell prompt examples
When writing a shell code block:
- Do not include a
$or>at the beginning of a shell instruction. It confuses more than it helps and it is not useful when copying the instructions. - Comments start with
#. - Choose "bash" to indicate the language in markdown.
See also
Django server-side development docs show good practice presentation of shell prompt commands.