Hi,

I feel kind of silly for asking this, but it's really bugging me. I've written a script that changes the color of my prompt and also changes my title of my X terminals. This script works fine if I type it, but for some reason it doesn't work when used as an executable script. Here's the script...

#!/bin/sh
#script to setup Terminal colors

echo "changing settings"

export PS1="\[\e]2;New Terminal Prefs \t\a\n\[\e[34;1m\]\u@\[\e[31;1m\]\H:\w\n\[\e[0m\]$> "

echo "done"

I get no errors with this script but 'export' doesn't seem to be executed. I don't know of an absolute path for 'export' and coule not find one even using slocate.

Anyone have any ideas how to get this working?

thanks,
phil

you must put it into a startup-script that the shell reads at startup.
put it in a file named " .profile " in your home dir.

otherwise it's just exported to the shell that runs the script.
and that one closes when the script ends.

egag

The only way to run that would be using the source command. That will execute the script in your current bash session. Use like: source <file>

thanks for the help Using the 'source' command made the script work correctly. For now I like being able to use this script on individual X terminals. However, if I did want to start an X session so that all started x terminals would have my prefs set how would I do this? I'm currently using Xfce. I thought calling the script in one of the .xinitrc files might do it but I'm not sure. Ideally I could simply activate this manually from the console before starting X, so I would have the choice of whether or not I wanted the prefs on.

Another question I have concerning this topic is how to change the colors for 'ls' I tried exporting new values for LS_OPTIONS but this seemed to have no effect. I get some of what I want if I su - to a user, but I shouldn't need to do this.

Any helpful information on any of this would be greatly appreciated.

thanks a ton for your help,
phil

I think I know what's the problem. By default terminals in X are not run as login shells so they won't read .bash_profile nor /etc/profile files. They will however, read .bashrc. You can find more about this reading bash man page (INVOCATION section).

To "solve" this and always load the values you want, you've to create a .bashrc file in your home folder with this content:
And then create one called .profile also in your home folder with the things you want, like:

awesome! Thank you very much! The .bashrc file gets loaded at every X terminal startup. To disable this, of course, I simply change the file name. In addition, I noticed that when I su - the accounts .profile file gets loaded. Thank you again!

phil