The Joy of Penguins : Linux System Administration

Linux System Administration

Shells

The Prompt

Avoid long, complicated prompts.

Just because you can place a lot of information in a prompt, doesn't mean you should.

                 \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

Some examples:

   
            $ export
PS1="> "

           
    $ export PS1="This is my super prompt > "

           
    $ export PS1="\u@\H > "

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