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...; "