I'd like to have my prompt formatting (coloring/highlighting) change based on the directory I'm in, or other critical aspects of my environment. prompt may include any of the following formatting ... how to set PS1 in csh. % set prompt='[%t][%n@%m:%~]% ' Now your prompt looks like this: [4:04pm][mixx941@freebsd:~]% To make these changes permanent, you can add the "set prompt" line above into your .cshrc file. Your .login file is sourced (executed) only when you login. Bourne Shell (sh): prompt The string which is printed before reading each command from the terminal. To uncomment a line, just delete the # character at the start of the line. tcsh (/ t i s i l / ... (csh). I use tcsh. Shell prompts are extremely customizable. How to: Change / Setup bash custom prompt (PS1) ... You can go the same way to change your shell to csh, bsh, or bash as ksh in your user account. $PS1, is usually the first thing I do when I'm trying a new shell; if you are using bash there are many resources on the internet that teaches you One suggestion is to get tcsh and use one of the prompt primitives. 2. I'm using the directions here to customize my CSH prompt. It depends which shell you are using. Customizing the prompt, a.k.a. With a shell, users can type in commands and run programs on a Unix system. Users direct the operation of the computer by entering commands as text for a command line interpreter to execute, or by creating text scripts of one or more such commands. What I do for either tcsh or csh is to put the following lines in my .cshrc: How to: Change / Setup bash custom prompt (PS1) ... You can go the same way to change your shell to csh, bsh, or bash as ksh in your user account. What's so good about C Shell? Bash has several prompts which can be customized to increase productivity, aesthetic appeal, and nerd cred. If you wish to make them global for all accounts, add that line into /etc/csh.cshrc Customizing your shell prompt. I'm being put in charge of managing a bunch of servers, I want to set up my prompts on each of them so that I don't get confused as to where I am logged in to. There is not space before or after this. tcsh is an enhanced but completely compatible version of the Berkeley UNIX C shell, csh(1). The prompt by default for csh on FreeBSD is simply a sing percent symbol. up vote 0 down vote favorite. 1.) /bin/tcsh : This is the TC Shell Now let us deal with the files you will need to edit: ... *Addendum to Z Shell Color Prompt* Note how we seperate the rst word of the hostname when setting the prompt. set prompt="\n%{\e[0;31m%}\[`whoami`\@`hostname -s` $PWD:t\]$ %{\e[m%}" You can find some more info and comparison of in this table, on that page you also find some info on the various colours. in your prompt ("mail% " instead of "/usr/spool/mail% ") you can use alias setprompt 'set prompt="$cwd:t% "' Some older csh's get the meaning of && and || reversed. /bin/csh : This is the C Shell. Basically, the main function a shell performs is to read in from the terminal what one types, run the commands, and show the output of the commands. How to: Change / Setup bash custom prompt (PS1) ... You can go the same way to change your shell to csh, bsh, or bash as ksh in your user account. Basic Elements; Status Elements; Date umask 077 I am currently setting my prompt in .cshrc with: set prompt="`whoami`@`hostname`:$cwd> " Unfortunately after I execute "cd .." the prompt