cant' set PS1 after restart on Mac

[DushanM]

On Mac OS X.4.10 I had Octave 2.9.14 running with the prompt modified to
read

    PS1 ('\n*** \s:\#\$\n=> ')

and had saved that variable to a file (~/octave/Oprompt.def).  Then
quit octave and the terminal, installed an EFI firmware update, shut
down, and rebooted (the install was successful).

Everything seemed to be fine, and the newly invoked octave included
the path to ~/octave that I had added previously.  Then I tried to
load PS1 from the saved value in Oprompt.def, and octave made no
objection, but just returned with the default prompt:

    octave-2.9.14:1> load ~/octave/Oprompt.def PS1
    octave-2.9.14:2> PS1
    PS1 = \n*** \s:\#\$\n=> 

Puzzled, I entered it by hand and got:

    octave-2.9.14:6> PS1 ('\n*** \s:\#\$\n=> ') 
    error: invalid vector index = 115

No variation of this did any better.  Any idea what I'm doing wrong
here?

One more question:  I made the Terminal prompt a different color
for visibility, like this (in bashrc):

    PS1='\n\[\e[1;34m\][\w]\[\e[0m\]\$\n=> '

Is it possible to add color to the Octave prompt as well?  It wasn't
clear how to do that from the docs.

Thanks for the help.

- Dushan Mitrovich