Everyone likes to personalize their environment a little bit.

I prefer a sparse environment for my command line. Testing the experience of having no prompt, I had no idea when the system finished a command. I could run the time(1) command every time, but being on a variety of systems as different users, in different directories, there is too much boilerplate. The command prompt suits this purpose nicely.

I wanted a simplistic way to show everything at once. The only problem was that all the parts were not available. Oh well, I can build my own pieces.

Nearly everything I wanted was available as part of Bash. The only piece missing was some code to show the current directory smarter. You can either see the current working directory (for example, "byron"), or you can see the entire directory from the root ("/home/byron"). That is fine most of the time, but occasionally you will encounter something monstrous like "/usr/local/share/etc/rc.d/wow/this/is/a/long/directory". That will take up the entirety of the command line.

I wrote the following python script to make the directory more terse; if the full path is below a certain number of characters, it will just show the path. If longer, it will show only the first character of each directory before the current directory.

#!/usr/local/bin/python
import sys

current_dir=sys.argv[1]
max_size_unaltered=25

#First, we define our functions...
def getfirstletter(a):
    return a[:1]

def print_unaltered_dir(dir):
    print dir

def print_terse_dir(dir):
    split_dir=current_dir.split('/')
    #remove first element - a blank - just throw it away
    split_dir.pop(0) 
    #store the last element - the immediate directory
    immediate_dir=split_dir.pop() 
    print "/" + \
        "/".join(map(getfirstletter, split_dir)) + \
        "/" + immediate_dir

    
#This is where the rubber hits the road.
current_dir_length = len(current_dir)
if current_dir_length < max_size_unaltered:
    print_unaltered_dir(current_dir)
else:
    print_terse_dir(current_dir)

Once that is somewhere (maybe in your ~/bin directory) you can use it as part of your prompt, aka your PS1 variable. I added the following to my bashrc script:

PS1="\n\d \@ \n\u@\h:\$(~/bin/concat_dir.py \w) \$ "

This gives me a command prompt like the following, if in a shallow path:

Sun Jul 06 08:24 PM 
byron@laser:/home/byron $ 

Or the following if you are in a very deep path, or a path with large words:

Sun Jul 06 08:30 PM 
byron@laser:/u/l/s/d/d/website $ pwd
/usr/local/share/doc/docbook-xsl/website