Journal of PlanetMike

In your home directory, add this line:

export PS1=”\d, \t\n \w \$ ”

to your .bash_profile settings file. This will have your command prompt appear with the current date, current time, a line break, and then the complete path to the directory you are in. The variables you can use include:

\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

I know this may not be very useful to a lot of people, but I wanted to make a note of this for the future. Happy New Year!