I have been searching around for a while and have not been able to find an answer to this. Whenever I use the command line in Ubuntu it always lists the full directory back to my home directory, how to I set it to only show the current working directory.
Linux – Set the terminal prompt in Ubuntu to show only the working directory name instead of its full path
linuxUbuntu
Related Solutions
Change the \w
(lowercase) to \W
(uppercase):
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\W\[\033[00m\]\$ '
^^
this one waaaaaay over here ------------------------------------------------+
Have a look at the Bash Prompt HOWTO for lots of fun details. example:
user@host:/usr/local/bin$ echo $PS1
${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;31m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;36m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$
user@host:/usr/local/bin$ export PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;31m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;36m\]\W\[\033[00m\]\$ '
user@host:bin$
The PROMPT_COMMAND
variable, if set, is a command that gets run before displaying the prompt specified in PS1
. In your case, PROMPT_COMMAND
runs an echo
statement with certain ANSI escape sequences that manipulate the titlebar of an Xterm.
If you suspect your PROMPT_COMMAND
is overriding your PS1
prompt, you can unset
it and test things out:
$ unset PROMPT_COMMAND
Finally, be sure that you're changing the PS1
definition that actually gets used. Common locations are /etc/bash.bashrc
, /etc/profile
, ~/.bashrc
, ~/.bash_profile
, ~/.profile
. The system files are generally (but not always) run before the user files.
To let bash return "user@hostname:path/to/directory$" as your prompt, add the following line to your ~/.bash_profile:
export PS1='\u@\H:\w$'
or
export PS1='\u@\H:\w$ '
if you like having a space between the $ and the command
to make the changes take effect immediately, run the following command in every open window (or restart Terminal):
source ~/.bash_profile
EDIT:
A list of available strings can be found in the paragraph "PROMPTING" in the man page for bash (man bash
):
PROMPTING
When executing interactively, bash displays the primary prompt PS1 when it is ready to read a command, and the secondary prompt PS2 when it needs more input to complete a command. Bash allows these prompt strings to be customized by inserting a number of backslash-escaped special characters that are decoded as follows: \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
Best Answer
Best guess for default Ubuntu install
Find where your
PS1
variable is set and change\w
to\W
.You can do an initial check of this method thus:
It is probably being set in your
.bashrc
. If not, check/etc/bashrc
and override the variable there in your.bashrc
. You will of course have to do anexec bash
or source your.bashrc
for changes made there to take effect.Other setups
There are different variations on how to do this depending on what shell you are using and how it is set up. For example, you might conceivably have your prompt set up like this:
In which case you will want to do: