Comments on: Customizing the Terminal: The Prompt

By: Darren Embry

Darren Embry — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:54:17 +0000

@newbie, You need to surround any terminal escape sequences with \[ and \], i.e., do this:

export PS1=”\[\e[0;31m\][\u@\h \W]\$ \[\e[m\] ”

The PROMPTING section of bash(1) documents this.

You may also wish to read tput(1) and terminfo(5) if you want to be terminal-agnostic.

By: newbie

newbie — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:10:02 +0000

hi, when I use the command:

export PS1=”\e[0;31m[\u@\h \W]\$ \e[m ”

I am unable to add lines while I am writing code. for example

when I am writing a script on command line, it does not add a new line, it simply overrides the prompt line.
ex:
PROMPT $

| grep “>” | PROMPT$ cat namefile.txt |

is there a way around it?

By: Matt Di Pasquale

Matt Di Pasquale — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:30:53 +0000

Hmmm… a quick man sed and a guess…
changed -re to -E and seems to work now…

PROMPT_COMMAND=’CurDir=`pwd|sed -e “s!$HOME!~!”|sed -E “s!([^/])[^/]+/!\1/!g”`’
PS1=”[\$CurDir] \$ ”

nice.

By: Matt Di Pasquale

Matt Di Pasquale — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:26:39 +0000

Oops. I tried the last approach (which you use) and got this error on my Mac, running OS X 10.5.7

sed: illegal option — r
usage: sed script [-Ealn] [-i extension] [file ...]
sed [-Ealn] [-i extension] [-e script] … [-f script_file] … [file ...]

By: Matt Di Pasquale

Matt Di Pasquale — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 07:31:26 +0000

Thanks!
This is awesome!
-Matt

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By: Darren Embry

Darren Embry — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:03:09 +0000

Nice article.
I hate one-line hacks.
Here’s an improvement:

_update_prompt () {
DIR=`pwd|sed -e “s!$HOME!~!”`
if [ ${#DIR} -gt 30 ]; then
CurDir=${DIR:0:12}…${DIR:${#DIR}-15}
else
CurDir=$DIR
fi
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=_update_prompt
PS1=”[\$CurDir] \$ ”

Also…

@ejes PROMPT_COMMAND does not need to be exported.

@wyn Make sure your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile sources ~/.bashrc. From Debian’s default .profile:

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
# include .bashrc if it exists
if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
. “$HOME/.bashrc”
fi
fi