From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line

CHAPTER 7Prompts

In this book, you've already seen lots of command lines. Throughout the previous chapters, you've probably noticed a short chunk of text at the beginning, located just to the left of the area where you type. This string is called a prompt. As an example, in the case of bash we show command lines that start like the following:

bash$

It is possible to change that string to show you information about your environment, such as the current directory, the username, or the time. In this chapter we show you how to make such changes. We also discuss a few operations the shell can carry out at about the time the prompt is printed, such as checking for mail or looking to see if other users have logged in or out. You can use these features ...