UNIX: I’ve just made the first change to my core bash
configuration in years, to add
-b to the set command-line. It triggered some thinking about
when the last one was.
It turns out, that apart from writing scripts and aliases frequently, I
haven’t changed my commandline UI in any respect, since about 2 years ago.
By contrast, I’ve been hacking about with GUI settings continually,
new desktop backgrounds, themes, colours, etc. Odd!
Anyway, here’s the tip — it’s very handy, I find.
I changed to using a 2-line prompt, with the first line containing the
time and the full working directory, in a ‘magic’ cut-and-pasteable
format:
: exit=0 Thu Jun 24 17:55:29 PDT 2004; cd /home/jm/DL
: jm 1203...;
Note that the prompt starts with “:”, which means that bash/sh
will ignore the line until it hits “;”. The end result is
that the entire line evaluates to “cd /home/jm/DL” when pasted.
Hey presto, cd’ing several terminals to the same dir just involves
triple-clicking in one, and middle-button-pasting into the others.
nifty! Similarly, the second line has a little bit of prompt, but
that snippet will be ignored when cut and pasted.
Having the exit status of the last command (bash var: $?) is useful
too. The code:
do_prompt () {
echo ": exit=$? `date`; cd $PWD"
}
PROMPT_COMMAND='do_prompt $?' # executed before every prompt
do_prompt 0 # set up first prompt
PS1=": `whoami` \!"
PS2="... >>; " # continuation prompt
PS1="$PS1...; "
Tags: bash, change, command, commandline, configuration, core, exit, home, line, respect, unix
