For iTerm2, how to make the working directory appear in the window title

(For reference, we’re talking about the Resume feature of Mac OS X Lion 10.7 and later.)

Terminal automatically restores the working directory if you’re using the default shell, bash. If you’re using some other shell, you’ll need to adapt the code in /etc/bashrc to send an escape sequence to communicate the working directory to Terminal so it can restore the directory later for Resume. If you’re using zsh, see my answer to Resume Zsh-Terminal (OS X Lion), in which I include the appropriate code for zsh.

If you have a custom ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc you may need to ensure that you’re not undoing the default behavior by modifying /etc/bashrc’s customizations. In particular, it sets the PROMPT_COMMAND environment variable to send the escape sequence at each prompt. If you customize that variable, you’ll need to prefix or append your code to the current value, e.g.:

PROMPT_COMMAND="<your code here>;$PROMPT_COMMAND"

Also, generally, ~/.bash_profile should execute ~/.bashrc:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
    . ~/.bashrc
fi

You could add something like this to the startup script of your default shell (mine is zsh, most people use bash, I guess, so you may have to tweak.)

Here's my bit of screen jiggery-pokery (in my .zshrc)

# Autoload screen if we aren't in it.  (Thanks Fjord!)
if [[ $STY = '' ]] then screen -xRR; fi

I got this from somewhere on the interwebs (I don't recall where, and I don't know who Fjord is, but good on him.

With this you can close your iTerm window, and it will resume where you left off when you reopen it. I highly recommend reading the screen man page also.