The Bash Shell,continued...
The Bash Prompt
This is the equivalent to using the DOS
PROMPT command or the tcsh set prompt= command. In bash, the
variable that stores what your prompt is to display is $PS1.
To change this you simply need to do something
basic like:
export PS1="this is my computer: "
And next time you look, your prompt will
read:
this is my computer:
This prompt will wait for you to enter
a command. You will notice that this is now set. Press ENTER,
type "ls", it stays. Great! But that is a little boring.
What you want it to do is display your
user name and/or the current directory you are in so that you
don't have to use pwd (the command to show your directory) constantly.
Bash allows you to use switches (as seen when we did an echo
$PS1 earlier) to display lots of useful info. Here is a list
of the main ones:
\d date (format: ddd mmm dd
- eg: Sat Mar 12)
\h display your computers hostname
\n newline
\s shell name (ie: bash)
\t time (24 hour format: hh:mm:ss
- eg: 16:22:08)
\u current user
\w working directory (this changes
on the fly to the directory
that you change to).
\$ display $ character
\\ display \ character
There are others, but these will be the
most useful to you. Play around and see what others you can find.
More bash shell programming --->>
