Robert Herjavec – Driven Last year I was at the Super Business Conference put on by The Fast Track To Cashflow Group. One of the main speakers was Robert Herjavec. I have to say I was not terribly excited to hear him speak, as I figured it would be all about the Dragon’s Den and that isn’t all that interesting to me. However, once Robert took to the stage I was taken back. By far one of the best stories I have heard and his message really hit home and resonated with me. I download a copy of his book “Driven” from amazon on my kindle, and have thoroughly enjoyed the read.

Everybody will offer you free advice, but the only good thing about free advice is the price.

Check the book out, you won’t be disappointed, and if you have a chance to hear Robert speak, I would highly recommend it.

When working on SSH sessions, you run into some environments that have weird prompts and colors associated with the prompt. Often I find I can’t even see the prompt where it is a dark blue on black. Maybe that is just a sign that I am getting older but it is really difficult to see.

So to change the prompt here are a list of options:

• \a : an ASCII bell character (07)
• \d : the date (Format: “Tue May 26”)
• \D{format} : the format is passed to strftime(3) and the result is inserted into the prompt string; an empty format results in a locale-specific time representation. The braces are required
• \e : an ASCII escape character (033)
• \h : the hostname up to the first ‘.’
• \H : the hostname
• \j : the number of jobs currently managed by the shell
• \l : the basename of the shell’s terminal device name
• \n : newline
• \r : carriage return
• \s : the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following the final slash)
• \t : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
• \T : the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
• \@ : the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
• \A : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
• \u : the username of the current user
• \v : the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
• \V : the release of bash, version + patch level (e.g., 2.00.0)
• \w : the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
• \W : the basename of the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
• \! : the history number of this command
• \# : the command number of this command
• \$ : if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
• \nnn : the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
• \\ : a backslash
• \[ : begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt
• \] : end a sequence of non-printing characters

In order to change the color you will need to add the escape sequence:  \e[x;ym where x = 0 or 1, zero is darker and one is lighter.

• y = 30 – Black, 31 – Red, 32 – Green, 33 – Brown, 34 – Blue, 35 – Purple, 36 – Cyan

So to change your prompt to be Red with user @ machine short name showing the directory in brackets and a mode at the end you would do the following, note that the \e[m at the end of the string effectively ends the color change otherwise the color change will impact everything that isn’t color controlled:

export PS1=’\e[1;31m[\u@\h \W] \$ \e[m’