Turbo charge your bash prompt
Bash prompt variables
The escape characters that can appear in the bash prompt are well-documented so let’s not cover that in any detail. But a good starting point is the “user@host:dir” combo, which conveniently is also the scp syntax.
PS1="u@h:w $ "
root@kali:/tmp $
Variables described in the bash documentation:
PS1 - The primary prompt string. The default value is ‘s-v$ ’.
PS0 - The value of this parameter is expanded like PS1 and displayed by interactive shells after reading a command and before the command is executed.
PROMPT_COMMAND - If set, the value is interpreted as a command to execute before the printing of each primary prompt ($PS1).
Sequence of evaluation
- Read user command
- Evaluate
PS0 - Execute user command
- Execute
PROMPT_COMMAND - Evaluate
PS1
PROMPT_COMMAND seems the perfect place to place arbitrary functions but the terminal doesn't count any characters emitted and you end up with ugly alignment side-effects (more on that below). So let's insert commands directly into PS1. Notice I’ve used single quotes to ensure the command is run each time, not just when PS1 is set. And we’re doing all our dev locally in the shell rather than editing bash configuration files, so we can simply run bash again at the prompt if our experiments have gone awry.
Let's ping a host of interest each time we hit return.
PS1='$(ping -c 1 -w 1 github.com >& /dev/null && echo OK || echo FAIL) u@h:w $ '
Great! When it succeeds. But if it fails and takes even a second to return the prompt becomes unusable.
Using color
You can use the ANSI e[33m codes in your bash scripts but I think tput is a far friendlier interface. (You'll still need to know the codes for your compiled code.)
Find out how many colours your system supports and print them.
tput colors
for c in {0..255}; do echo $(tput setab $c) $(tput sgr0)$c; done | column
Ignoring control characters
If you're using non-printable control characters like setting the colour you must tell the shell not to count them lest it misbehaves. Cursoring through history doesn't work in this example:
PS1="$(tput setaf 44)$(date)$(tput sgr0) $ "
But we simply need to tell bash to ignore the control characters by enclosing them in square brackets thus:
PS1="[$(tput setaf 44)]$(date)[$(tput sgr0)] $ "
What can we do at the prompt?
How about checking your crypto prices?
PS1='$(
curl --silent "https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/data/price?fsym=BTC&tsyms=USD" | grep -o [0-9.]*
) u@h:w $ '
9080.52 root@kali:/tmp $
Or displaying the location of your public IP?
PS1='$(
curl --silent ifconfig.co/country
) u@h:w $ '
United Kingdom root@kali:~/cpp $
Further examples
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