Customizing the Bash Prompt 19 December 2010
Posted by Maulvi Bakar in : Linux,Unix,Work , trackbackIf 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!
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