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I am using bash, and in my .basrhrc: I have the following which defined how my prompt looks:

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\w\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\!:\#\[\033[00m\]\$ '

I think the \w display the current path of the shell.

Is there any way to limit the number of character used to display the current path of the shell?

Dennis Williamson
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michael
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1 Answers1

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You can use \W (capital "W") which will make your home directory (/home/username) display as a tilde ('~') and only show the basename of the current directory. So an example might look like:

dir:509:9$ pwd
/home/username/dir
dir:510:10$ cd ..
~:511:11$

If you're using Bash 4, you can set the PROMPT_DIRTRIM shell variable to a number of trailing directory levels to display. But there was a bug in it which was fixed in a maintenance release (4.1, I think).

Dennis Williamson
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