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Some time back I found a nifty little function to nicely and neatly add color to my bash prompt, and to do so in a readable and easily editable way. I forget the site where I originally saw the function, so I apologize to its author for displaying it here without attribution, but it’s certainly made my life easier; I have my prompt set to display the time, the user name and host name where I’m logged in, the directory I’m in, and the root/other token. I’m a visual kind of guy, too, so I alter the user/hostname so that it’s a different color for each of the boxes I’m regularly accessing at home.
On GNU/Linux and OS X, the two operating systems I’m most frequently using, the prompt the user most often sees is stored in a variable named PS1
. PS1 contains some pretty boring default values for most OSs, especially OS X, but fortunately we can make it a lot more informative and useful by modifying its value in the .bashrc
file in your home directory, assuming you’re using bash as your shell—if you’re familiar enough with Unix and/or BSD to use a shell other than bash, you probably have your own ideas what PS1 should look like and probably think including colors in a prompt makes the baby Stallman cry. Or you use emacs for your operating system.