Changing Bash Prompts

Changing Bash Prompts

Changing Bash Prompts is fairly straight-forward when you know the commands. The code looks fairly strange when you first look at it, but there is a lot of logic behind it. I used Debian to experiment with how to change the look and feel of the command prompt. Normally you would see something like – user@host:~$ as your command prompt.  Tilde (~) being your home directory. If you were in the logs it might look like – user@host: /var/log$ .

Most Linux systems change the command prompt to a pound sign (#) if the root user is signed into the system, instead of the dollar sign ($).

Getting rid of the directory

Inserting the time

Making the username green

Prompt Escape Sequences

Note: The focus on $PS1 in this article because its siblings are too uncommon in daily work with the shell. There are $PS2, $PS3 and $PS4. These other shells are not normally used, so I will not go into them.

Getting it all right

Once you feel that you have the prompt you want it, is time to write it into your Bashrc file. Whether you decide to go minimalist or extravagant with lots of colors, to keep it current you need to keep it in your local Bashrc file. You can also put a different style in root’s Bashrc file – say green username for the User and a red username for Root. That way you will know which is which just by color coding the usernames. 

Scripting them in your Bashrc file – I laid it out so you can  play with the colors if you wish:

Here is the one that I scripted.

Conclusion

Changing your BASH prompt is fairly easy and now you have the script to place into your Bashrc file. Here it is all zipped up for you in a text file ready to insert into your Bashrc file.