Showing posts with label prompt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prompt. Show all posts

13 May 2014

576. Shortening the bash prompt in debian

This is yet another post in which I'm (almost) simply reposting a solution that someone else has already posted online.

Let's say that my contribution is to put it in context of debian.

Either way, here's the problem that needed solving: the debian prompt by default lists all directories, which sometimes means that the prompt itself breaks across two lines.

Luckily, it's not difficult to chop the prompt down to a more manageable, yet still informative, length. The solution is here (we do like a descriptive URL): http://superuser.com/questions/387673/how-can-i-limit-the-number-of-directories-in-my-prompt

That particular solution also allows you to change the permissible length of the path that will be shown -- change the 50 in the argument to droppath to set the number of chars.

Edit your ~/.bashrc and add the bits in red:
# drops first portion of a path $1 if length is greater than $2 function __droppath { if [[ ${#1} -gt $2 ]]; then p=$1 while [ ${#p} -gt $2 ]; do p="/"$(echo "$p"|cut -d"/" -f3-) done echo "..."$p else echo $1 fi } if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]$(_droppath "\w" 50)\[\033[00m\]\$ ' else PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: $(__droppath "\w" 50)\$ ' fi

and here's an example using a length of 25 chars (which is a bit short).

Unmodified:
me@niobium: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages$\

Modified:
me@niobium: .../python2.7/site-packages$

You can always use pwd to figure out what the full path is if necessary:
me@niobium: .../python2.7/site-packages$ pwd
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages