BASHing Your Prompt

Customizing how your command line prompt looks like isn't just cool. It can also be rather useful. You can change your prompt by running the following command: PS1=" ". For example, PS1="[\t] [ \u@\h \W]\$ " will change your command line to something that resembles this: [21:52:01][user@hostname :~]$. To permanently change this, you'll have to alter this in ~/.bashrc

Here are the options available:

\a	an ASCII bell character (07)
\d	the date in "Weekday Month Date" format (e.g., "Tue May 26")
\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
\u	the username of the current user
\v	the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
\V	the release of bash, version + patchlevel (e.g., 2.00.0)
\w	the current working directory
\W	the basename of the current working directory
\!	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