According to the bash manual (emphasis mine):PS4  The value is the prompt printed before the command line is echoed when the -x option is set (see The Set Builtin). The first character of PS4 is replicated multiple times, as necessary, to indicate multiple levels of indirection. The default is + .Is there a way to disable this behavior? I thought of cursor left (\b), but bash seems to only consider the literal first character (\).
Preventing bash $PS4 from replicating first character
bash;debugging
You can set PS4 to have its first character to be NUL, which takes no space on screen:export PS4=\000 You will then have no visual indication of how deeply-nested the commands in question are.