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SaidbakR
Asked: 2021-04-17 09:21:36 +0800 CST

How to reduce initials of the console prompt

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I don't know the term of the initial text before the command prompt of the console or the terminal, but the screen shot below should demonstrate well what I mean:

enter image description here

I want to reduce the highlighted text in the image: said@said-Satellite-L850-A700: to something like: said@pc or even to be only $ without any modification for the computer's name. Does it possible?

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can control the prompt in Bash (and Zsh) by setting the PS1 environment variable.

    You may do this in your $HOME/.bashrc file, for example.

    Example:

    PS1='\u@\h:\w\$ '

    or for your-user@pc use

    PS1='\u@pc'

    or go simple

    PS1='$ '

    Here's some of the magic tokens you can use.

    \h : the hostname up to the first ‘.’
\H : the hostname
\u : your username
\t : time in 24hr format
\w : current working dir

    You can apply colour codes too, should you wish.

    EDIT: colour, bold etc.

    ANSI escape sequences can be specified like \033[ then some numbers for bold and colours joined with ; then m and can be reset with \033[0m;

    e.g. PS1='\033[31mxxx\033[0m ' would give you a red xxx as a prompt.

    Very mini cheatsheet, replace 31 (Red) in the above with..

    • 1;31 for bold red
    • 1 for bold default colour
    • 31;43 for red text (31) on yellow background (43). The second, background colour uses the same code as the foreground but +10
    • 38;2;r;g;b where you replace r g and b with a value 0-255 for red green blue, e.g. 38;2;255;180;0 would set it to a nice orange

    PS1='\033[31mxxx\033[0m ' would give you a red xxx as a prompt.

    Please see an excellent answer at stackoverflow for a fuller list.

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