If you’re on Linux, most of the time the current existing bash prompt is fine. Other types of UNIX, in my case is Solaris, is somewhat spartan in appearance. You’ll either get a boring ‘$’ or ‘#’ or simply a display of version.
The table below are the various options available -
- \a : an ASCII bell character (07)
- \d : the date in “Weekday Month Date” format (e.g., “Tue May 26″)
- \D{format} : the format is passed to strftime(3) and the result is inserted into the prompt string; an empty format results in a locale-specific time representation. The braces are required
- \e : an ASCII escape character (033)
- \h : the hostname up to the first ‘.’
- \H : the hostname
- \j : the number of jobs currently managed by the shell
- \l : the basename of the shell’s terminal device name
- \n : newline
- \r : carriage return
- \s : the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following the final slash)
- \t : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
- \T : the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
- \@ : the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
- \A : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
- \u : the username of the current user
- \v : the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
- \V : the release of bash, version + patch level (e.g., 2.00.0)
- \w : the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
- \W : the basename of the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
- \! : the history number of this command
- \# : the command number of this command
- \$ : if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
- \nnn : the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
- \\ : a backslash
- \[ : begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt
- \] : end a sequence of non-printing characters
Personally, I just wanted to duplicate the bash prompt on Linux into Solaris. All I did was thus in the “/etc/profile” -
export PS1
PS1='[\u@\h:\w]\$ '
Remember to use single quotes ” ‘ ” rather than the double quotes. Otherwise the “\$” will not work.
Enjoy!