Djihed Afifi

My favourite UNIX shell is bash, or the Bourne Again Shell. Its syntax is neat and clean, I find it cleaner than most other shells, and it is available on most UNIX variants. its customisability is also very good. I’ve customised the default prompt to a colourful joyful and informative message. I call it the clown prompt. Here is a screenshot of how it looks like in putty, note that I have slightly changed the blue colour on putty to make it more readable.

To make it the default prompt, copy these lines to the end of your ~/.bashrc file. If there is not one, create it.

# Term settings
TTYTEMPNAME=$(tty)
CHOMPED=${TTYTEMPNAME:5}
PS1="[33[1;33m][[33[1;32m]t[33[1;33m]]
[33[1;33m][[33[1;31m]u[33[1;33m]:
[33[1;31m]h[33[1;33m]]
[33[1;33m][[33[1;36m]$CHOMPED
[33[1;33m]:[33[1;36m]#[33[1;33m]]
[33[1;33m][[33[1;35m]w[33[1;33m]]
[33[1;34m]#[33[0m] "

The first two lines grab the name of the current tty, line 3 prints the time, lines 4,5 print the username and the name of the machine, lines 6,7 prints the name of the tty along with the command number, line 8 prints the current working directory. I find all of this information valuable offhand sometimes. To apply changes, source your ~/.bashrc file by issuing: source ~/.bashrc

For peace of mind, insert this line into your ~/.bashrc file, after the previous code. It solves a problem where long lines would wrap to the same current line.

shopt -s checkwinsize