Hide the current working directory in terminal

posted on 25th Nov, 2011

In Ubuntu as a default, the terminal prompt will show the current working directory, but as you dig deeper into a file structure you will have less and less space to type commands.

There are a number of prompts that you may come across PS1 is the default, this is a value stored as a environment variable called PS1. To see its current value, type echo $PS1

To change it, you can set a new value for the variable:

This will only show the user@host in the prompt. To make the change permanent, append to the end of ~/.bash_profile (or ~/.bashrc).

If you really want something more minimal you can try this:

If your feeling creative you can even add some colours like so:

Here's a list of shorthand that you can use when composing these:

• \a The 'bell' charakter
• \A 24h Time
• \d Date (e.g. Tue Dec 21)
• \e The 'escape' charakter
• \h Hostname (up to the first ".")
• \H Hostname
• \j No. of jobs currently running (ps)
• \l Current tty
• \n Line feed
• \t Time (hh:mm:ss)
• \T Time (hh:mm:ss, 12h format)
• \r Carriage return
• \s Shell (i.e. bash, zsh, ksh..)
• \u Username
• \v Bash version
• \V Full Bash release string
• \w Current working directory
• \W Last part of the current working directory
• \! Current index in history
• \# Command index
• \$ A "#" if you're root, else "$"
• \\ Literal Backslash
• \@ Time (12h format with am/pm)