Hi,

I recently installed Red Hat 9 on my PC and I want to set my environment up so I can see what directory I'm in every time I log in or execute a command at my shell prompt. At the moment the information I've found to do this just leaves me showing my home directory whatever place I'm at.

You insert the following line in your ~/.bash_profile (or in some distros, ~/.bashrc):

PS1='\u@\h:\w\$ '

PS1 is the prompt environment variable. \u is the code for username. \h is the code for the hostname. \w is your current working directory. \$ is your prompt character. The '@' and the space after \$ will appear literally.

I usually insert the newline code, \n, because I like to have the prompt on a separate line than my commands. ie. PS1='\u@\h:\w\n\$ '

You can also set PS1 manually from the command prompt, but you have to do this everytime you log into a console shell.