Terminal prompt messed up after changing value of PS1

Question

I carelessly entered a command in the terminal that should have been in a shell script:

export PS1=$PATH:~/drush23/drush/

now in my terminal instead of this:

ubuntu@ip-10-16-134-18:/home/ubuntu$

I see this:

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/home/ubuntu/drush23/drush/

and when I change directories this line always stays... I don't know what to do

I have byobu...

score 14 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 21 '17 at 20:52

14

$PS1 is an environment variable that tells yours shell how to format the prompt. Changing the value with export, as you did, only applies to that session; so you can just open up a new shell (not a sub-shell) and see a familiar prompt.

Otherwise, if you really want your prompt back in this session itself, just rerun your shell's preferences file. For Bash users, that is:

. ~/.bashrc

I don't know if that will work (at least, without causing other issues) for Byobu; but you can just set the prompt to a sane value like this:

export PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '

Or, if you don't want to or can't have a colour prompt, a simpler one would be:

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

where \u is your username, \h is your hostname, and \w is the full (logical) path of your current working directory.

edited Apr 21 '17 at 20:52

Community

1

answered Apr 23 '14 at 12:19

Yatharth Agarwal

809

i wasn't aware the $PS1 controlled that... thanks! – Moshe Shaham Apr 23 '14 at 12:23
just hit in terminal . ~/.bashrc. It will reset PS1 variable and you should get back your prompt. – sourav c. Apr 23 '14 at 18:33
@souravc Are you sure that wouldn't cause problems for the OP? he's using Byobu. – Yatharth Agarwal Apr 24 '14 at 09:45
@YatharthROCK I don't think it would cause any problem. What are you expecting as possible problem? – sourav c. Apr 25 '14 at 04:16
@souravc Sorry, wasn't thinking straight. – Yatharth Agarwal Apr 25 '14 at 06:07
do you have an extra PS1= in there ? :) – Ciprian Tomoiagă Apr 07 '17 at 20:12
Your second option rescued and restored my prompt, thanks! PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}[\033[01;32m]\u@\h[\033[00m]:[\033[01;34m]\w[\033[00m]$ ' – Osmar Dec 20 '18 at 19:37

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 23 '14 at 12:19

1

You can set PS1 to a reasonable value for this Terminal session using:

export PS1=$'\h:\w\$'

The old value should also be restored after closing and restarting Terminal, a reboot, etc.

answered Apr 23 '14 at 12:19

jkt123

3,530
22
24

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 18 '18 at 12:33

0

I had this same issue. I used PS1 to set the prompt to "Test"..

Later I was unable to go back to the default colored prompt.

however i was checking some answer in this website & i had to check which shell i'm running.

I tried $SHELL & it got reset to it's default colored prompt value.

"$SHELL"

I'm not a pro in this. This is purely accidental, I don't know if this will work for you or not.

But it's worth a try.

answered Jun 18 '18 at 12:33

Kurk

1

1

Can you explain what you you did to SHELL? – Stephen Rauch Jun 18 '18 at 13:12
I really have no idea how it worked.. I didn't edit anything related to shell either. Do check out the screenshot link : https://imgur.com/a/l4SGtBK – Kurk Jun 19 '18 at 18:43
3

FYI, this simply runs a new shell. If you run exit, you'll be back to the messed up prompt. – user8292439 Oct 31 '18 at 20:25

Terminal prompt messed up after changing value of PS1

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