How do I automatically echo the pwd to the shell after cd command?

Question

How do I automatically echo the pwd to the bash shell after a cd command? My ancient Solaris system does it yet I cant find out how to do it in Ubuntu. Effectively I want it to look like below so I don't have to type pwd all the time!

user@server[USR@SOL] cd  
/export/home/user  
user@server[USR@SOL] cd ..  
/export/home  
user@server[USR@SOL] cd ..  
/export/

Thanks

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 28 '23 at 15:49

The short answer: you have a PS1 environment variable which describes the structure of the prompt. Including \w in that variable will cause the current working directory to be shown in the prompt.

Long answer: this is usually done in ~/.bashrc. If it's omitted or removed there, you can use the following code (taken from a standard .bashrc) to recreate the standard Ubuntu prompt, which looks like this: user@host:pwd$

The code is:

# set variable identifying the chroot you work in (used in the prompt below)
if [ -z "${debian_chroot:-}" ] && [ -r /etc/debian_chroot ]; then
    debian_chroot=$(cat /etc/debian_chroot)
fi

# set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color)
case "$TERM" in
    xterm-color|*-256color) color_prompt=yes;;
esac

# uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned
# off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window
# should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt
#force_color_prompt=yes

if [ -n "$force_color_prompt" ]; then
    if [ -x /usr/bin/tput ] && tput setaf 1 >&/dev/null; then
    # We have color support; assume it's compliant with Ecma-48
    # (ISO/IEC-6429). (Lack of such support is extremely rare, and such
    # a case would tend to support setf rather than setaf.)
    color_prompt=yes
    else
    color_prompt=
    fi
fi

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
fi
unset color_prompt force_color_prompt

# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"
    ;;
*)
    ;;
esac

How do I automatically echo the pwd to the shell after cd command?

1 Answers1