Bash shell prompt, which is the famous $PS1 variable’s value. After some improvements I’m using this value
'\[\a\033[30;47m\]\u@\h \[\033[32m\]\W\[\033[30m\]\$\[\033[0m\]'
(excluding the single quotes, of course) right now.
Some notes: This will let the shell beep(if your machine has a speaker, and the driver — module pcspkr — is correctly loaded) every time the prompt comes out(when the command you executed is finished), this is very handy for long running commands, you can issue a command, read some blogs(or doing anything you like), when the command done it will inform you with the beep, so no need to “wait and just watch the screen”. Colorful prompt(I guess no body — at least not many — still use some terminal which can’t display text with color) is a great help when dealing with long page by page command output, so you can scroll the output and easily find your command line(because they are colorful, not black and white).
My original PS1 used to have \es within it, but I’ve replaced them with \033s. This is to avoid a problem which will occur with some versions of bash(or maybe nothing about bash, just the whole software environment causes the problem): when typing long(more than half a line), after some point you will see that the characters you keep entering goes half-way back to the beginning of the line, overwriting the characters you entered before, the command can just be run with no problem, just a little strange and not so comfort when typing. The $PS1 value I posted above have been tested with CentOS 4.5, FreeBSD 4.11 with bash 3 installed, hopefully it will successfully be used with other environment. I’d like to hear from you about the “portability” of PS1, and surely, if you have a better prompt value to share.
For the question “how to change the PS1 value on my machine”, I’d recommend you read some other article, there’s plenty of them, for example:
http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/howtos/Bash-Prompt/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO-2.html
screenshot:
