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>4.3. What to Put in Your Prompt</H1
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>You'll find I put username, machine name, time, and current directory name
in most of my prompts. With the exception of the time, these are very
standard items to find in a prompt, and time is probably the next most
common addition. But what you include is entirely a matter of personal
taste. Here is an interesting example to help give you ideas.&#13;</P
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>Dan's prompt is minimal but very effective, particularly for the way he
works.&#13;</P
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>[giles@nikola:~]$ PS1="\!,\l,\$?\$ "
1095,4,0$ non-command
bash: non-command: command not found
1096,4,127$ </PRE
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>Dan doesn't like that having the current working directory can resize the
prompt drastically as you move through the directory tree, so he keeps
track of that in his head (or types "pwd"). He learned Unix with csh and
tcsh, so he uses his command history extensively (something many of us
weaned on Bash do not do), so the first item in the prompt is the history
number. The second item is the tty number, an item that can be useful to
"screen" users. The third item is the exit value of the last
command/pipeline (note that this is rendered useless by any command
executed within the prompt - you can work around that by capturing it to
a variable and playing it back, though). Finally, the "\$" is a dollar
sign for a regular user, and switches to a hash mark ("#") if the user is
root.&#13;</P
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