Change bash title to show truncated pwd

Question

I use tilda as my terminal on Ubunut 14.10. The trouble I have is that I want to have the tab bar, since the titles in it are actually useful for navigation, but having username@computer:~/some/folder is irritating. So I looked around, and yes, I can change bash's title so that it doesn't display the username and computer.

But that only partially solves the problem, because even if I only have the pwd as the title, it grows really fast. And I don't need the whole path, so I was wondering if there is a way to set the maximum size of the title. So that if I'm in

/home/username/Downloads/some_unzipped_folder/subfolder/

The title is displayed as

/home/usern...folder/subfolder/

depending on how much width I set, so that I get some useful information from the title, but not have my tab bar in tilda fill up quickly.

Did you try setting PROMPT_DIRTRIM? http://askubuntu.com/a/29580/158442 — muru, Feb 11 '15 at 14:40
@muru Though it has the problem that I lose the initial folders in the path, and the path can still get long if the folder names are unwieldy. — hoodakaushal, Feb 11 '15 at 14:49
@hoodakaushal if you want that, try the second solution in that answer. I think it retains the first ten characters as well. — muru, Feb 11 '15 at 14:57

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 11 '15 at 14:54

2

You can use bash variable string subsetting. For example

echo "${PWD:(-10)}"

to only show the last 10 characters. Change this value as you want. So for the bash title, set the PS1 variable (to do it permanent, put the line into ~/.bashrc). For example:

PS1="[...]$(echo ${PWD:(-5)}) $ "

Use sed for more complex pattern changing (e.g. the middle part of the path).

answered Feb 11 '15 at 14:54

setempler

510

In the similar question @muru is pointing at, there is a more complex example. See here. – setempler Feb 11 '15 at 14:57

Change bash title to show truncated pwd

1 Answers1