Change Command Prompt - Variables are literal, and changes to .bashrc or .bash_profile not making a difference

Trying to change my command prompt in OS X 10.8 / Mountain Lion. Changes to ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile do not make any difference. Like:

export PS1="\W \$"

It defaults to the host name ("\h\%"). Even if I try to set PS1 in the terminal, it changes but displays the variables literally, as below:

ws10% PS1="\W \$"
\W $

(with ws10 being the host name)

My ~/.bashrc file:

export PS1="\W \$ "

Any ideas? I keep getting lost when I cd up and down the directory structure! Thanks a lot.

Solution 1:

Typically on Mac OS X, only .bash_profile is executing when starting a new terminal. A common solution is to source one file into the other, for example in ~/.bashrc:

[ -r ~/.bash_profile ] && source ~/.bash_profile

Apart from that, your example works perfectly fine for me when put in .bash_profile. If you still experience problems, maybe you are overlooking something else?

Solution 2:

I copied my .bashrc and .profile from an old mac and was seeing this issue. It came down to the fact that .bashrc was checking for a specific terminal emulation name "xterm-color". In Mountain Lion, xterm-color was renamed to xterm-16color and a new xterm-256color emulator was added:

check to see if your .bashrc has this check:

case "$TERM" in
    xterm-color) color_prompt=yes;;
esac

and add the new term names, so it looks like this:

case "$TERM" in
    xterm-color)    color_prompt=yes;;
    xterm-16color)  color_prompt=yes;;
    xterm-256color) color_prompt=yes;;
esac