How xterm get known that current dir changed?

pvv · 03-14-2004, 06:43 PM

I found all linux terminal emulators (xterm, kterminal, gnome's) under Linux RH9 - all they updates titlebars when current dir changed by a command typed.
Have you any idea how they do it (looking from programmer's side) ?

P.S. terminals only interprets incoming text and escape sequences (e.g. color change), and don't know even that bash is used on the server side.

jailbait · 03-14-2004, 08:19 PM

"Have you any idea how they do it (looking from programmer's side) ?"

The name of the current directory is kept in a variable called CWD. Try:
echo $CWD

You can use CWD in your script programs to refer to the current working directory. You can use PWD to print your current working directory.

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pvv · 03-15-2004, 06:22 AM

jailbait
$CWD is useful for script writers.
But it'd be very hard to to implement such featur using $CWD:
after ech command input by user xterm should:
1) stop incoming bytes to be reflected on screen
2) send 'echo $CWD' to remote server
3) accept response (/home/user/')
4) start incoming bytes reflecting on the screen

But it's impossible thing, as I know, to recognize when user finished input and when server finished response.

P.S. I may look at source of xterm, but it's very very large, as all useful programms

kolargol · 03-15-2004, 08:27 AM

Xterm has no idea that the current directory has changed.
It is the shell that sends the escape sequence telling xterm to modify
the titlebar as part of the prompt.

Have a look at the Bash Prompt Howto:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...mpt-HOWTO.html

it is all explained in there.