Linux Terminal Directory – How to Shorten Current Directory Path

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If I am in a deep directory, let's say:

~/Desktop/Dropbox/School/2017/C/A3/

then when I open up terminal, it says 

bob@bob-ubuntu:~/Desktop/Dropbox/School/2017/C/A3/$

and then I write my command.
That is very long, and every line I write in the terminal goes to the next line. I want to know if there's a way so that it only displays my current directory. I want it to display:

bob@bob-ubuntu: A3/$

This way it's much clear, and always I can do pwd to see my entire directory. I just don't want the entire directory visible in terminal because it takes too much space.

Best Answer

You need to modify PS1 in your shell startup file (probably .bashrc).

If it's there already, its setting will contain \w, which is what gives your working directory. Change that to \W (upper case). The line in bashrc file looks like below:

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\W\[\033[00m\]\$ '

Log out and in again, or do:

. .bashrc

or (you need to add this prefix '~/' if you are in others directory)

source ~/.bashrc

(or whatever your file is).

If it isn't there, add something like:

PS1='\u@\h: \W:\$'

to .bashrc or whatever. Look up PS1 in the bash manual page to get more ideas.

Be careful; bash can use several more than one initialisation file, e.g. .bashrc and .bash_profile; it may be that PS1 is set in a system-wide one. But you can override that in one of your own files.

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