I have just installed Gentoo, and boy what a long process that was, and I would like to modify my "console" to suit my likings. How can I get information on modifying what the prompt text/color is for bash? Right now, it's "bash-2.05b#" for all non-root users and "gentoo directory #" for root user where gentoo is red and directory is blue. Can someone help me find this documentation? I know that I have to export in my /etc/profile and there is even one already in there, with the code to only highlight for root user, but I would like to see all options I have instead of just the one defaulted by gentoo. Thanks, Jeremy

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork.../l-tip-prompt/

Also a thread around here about 'What's your prompt look like?' and 'man bash'. ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bashrc are key after /etc/profile. Also /etc/DIR_COLORS and ~/.dir_colors. 'man dircolors' for some good stuff there. Hard to be real specfic - only you know if you want xml files to be chartreuse.

Here is a link to an article written by, none other than, the President-CEO of Gentoo Technologies, Daniel Robbins. This sould get you well on the way to configuring your own bash prompt, or just copy one of Danials. I personally like the one that puts the current working directory and hostname in the title bar.

ha ha

digiot beat me to it. I linked to the same article.

The titlebar's one of my favorites, too. It's cool not wasting space on the current directory but not having to type 'pwd' to see it, either.

Thanks a lot all.

if you are using kde I did this: on the konsole icon>>r-click>>properties>>execute>>under command enter konsole --ls

Well...I have my bash prompt looking the way I want but now, I need to figure out how to make it work like Red Hat does. In Red Hat, you can do "ls -a" and the files are colored depending on the type of file they are and the permissions. Can someone help me out or point me in the proper direction regarding this? Thanks, Jeremy

I don't know how Red Hat does it specifically, but that's where dircolors probably comes in - and it may be a combination of putting aliases in the bash configs, as well. 'ls -a' is standard but if you want the 'll's and so on, those would be aliases and the coloring of the files would be configured through dircolors. Between what the prompt configuring said about colors and what's in /etc/DIR_COLORS, it's pretty straightforward.

In "/etc/profile" I added an alias for ls to be:

alias ls="ls --color"

That fixed it.