Installing Bashish

Not all the links on the Bashish Download Page seem to be working, however the source tarball is working fine. Once extracted, it can be installed from the command line with

./configure && make && sudo make install

If you need details on the above steps, see How to Install Software from a Tarball in Linux.

You’ll need to restart your shell for Bashish to take effect.

Choosing Themes

Bashish comes with several themes in the base package, and you can list them with the command

bashish list

And once you’ve seen a theme you’d like to try, just enter

bashish (theme name)

There is an alternate method, which will allow you to browse the themes instead of specifying one-at-a-time, but in the tests performed for this article, the theme manager failed to apply changes to theme selection, so the above method is recommended. Should you wish to try the theme manager, it can be run with the command bashishtheme and requires the dialog program in order to run properly.

Disabling Bashish

There are some cases in which Bashish might cause problems with software run through it, so the developers have included a fairly simple way to temporarily suspend Bashish for the duration of a process. To run a command without Bashish, run it as

BASHISH_DISABLED=1 your_command

Recommended Themes

Of the themes included with Bashish, there are a few that stand out as especially cool (at least in this author’s opinion). The following themes are the ones we’d most recommend, either for usefulness or simply because of the cool factor.

The Box theme applies a border around each section of your output, marking a clear distinction between events.

The Bashish2 theme is an elegant 2-liner with some minimal information.

The default theme BlueSteel, and with good reason. It looks lovely and contains several bits of useful info.

Elite and Elite2 are favorites as well, because they pack a lot of info into a small space, and include bash history number in the top line.

The LCARS theme is clearly more about style than substance, as it’s intended to resemble the LCARS computer interface seen on several Star Trek series. It doesn’t give much in the ways of useful info, and it takes up a lot of space, but it deserves a mention.

Finally, for those who want a clear visual split between commands, but not a bunch of text in the way, we’ve got the simplistic Uberprompt.

Conclusion

If you want a fancy shell without trying to decode a line like PS1=”\[\033[35m\]\t\[\033[m\]-\[\033[36m\]\u\[\033[m\]@\[\033[32m\]\h:\[\033[33;1m\]\w\[\033[m\]\$ “ to do it, Bashish is a great way to go. There are enough built-in themes to satisfy just about anyone, and for the most part, they look great. This author will probably be using BlueSteel for quite a while.

Related Posts:

• 8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts
• Making The Linux Command Line A Little Friendlier
• The Beginner Guide to Writing Linux Shell Scripts
• How to Multitask at the Linux Command Line with Screen

Note – to use any of these prompts, you can copy & paste the “PS1=” line directly into your terminal. To make the change permanent, paste the line to the end of your ~/.bashrc file.

1. Show Happy face upon successful execution

This prompt is probably the most amusing one on the list, but remains useful. The idea is that as long as your commands execute successfully, your prompt shows a happy face. Any time a command fails, it shows a sad face instead.

Example:

Code:

PS1="\`if [ \$? = 0 ]; then echo \[\e[33m\]^_^\[\e[0m\]; else echo \[\e[31m\]O_O\[\e[0m\]; fi\`[\u@\h:\w]\\$ "

2.Change color on bad command

Here’s one of my favorites. This prompt has it all. Like above, the prompt changes color if your last command failed to run successfully, but it also shortens long paths and contains the bash history number of each command for easy retrieval.

Example:

Code:

PROMPT_COMMAND='PS1="\[\033[0;33m\][\!]\`if [[ \$? = "0" ]]; then echo "\\[\\033[32m\\]"; else echo "\\[\\033[31m\\]"; fi\`[\u.\h: \`if [[ `pwd|wc -c|tr -d " "` > 18 ]]; then echo "\\W"; else echo "\\w"; fi\`]\$\[\033[0m\] "; echo -ne "\033]0;`hostname -s`:`pwd`\007"'

3. Multi lines prompt

If you’re the type who wants to pack your prompt full of information, then here’s the one for you. This one is a multi-line prompt containing date/time, full path, user and host, active terminal, even file count and space usage.
Example:

Code:

PS1="\n\[\033[35m\]\$(/bin/date)\n\[\033[32m\]\w\n\[\033[1;31m\]\u@\h: \[\033[1;34m\]\$(/usr/bin/tty | /bin/sed -e 's:/dev/::'): \[\033[1;36m\]\$(/bin/ls -1 | /usr/bin/wc -l | /bin/sed 's: ::g') files \[\033[1;33m\]\$(/bin/ls -lah | /bin/grep -m 1 total | /bin/sed 's/total //')b\[\033[0m\] -> \[\033[0m\]"

4. Color manage your prompt

There’s nothing particularly fancy about this prompt, other than the good use of color to separate the different pieces of information. As you can see, it provides time, username, hostname, and current directory. Fairly minimal but useful.

Example:

Code:

PS1="\[\033[35m\]\t\[\033[m\]-\[\033[36m\]\u\[\033[m\]@\[\033[32m\]\h:\[\033[33;1m\]\w\[\033[m\]\$ "

5. Show full path

This one’s a nice, clean, minimal 2-line prompt (plus a blank line at the top). You’ve got your full path at the first line and pretty much just the username at the bottom. If you want to remove the blank line at the start of every prompt, just take out the first “\n”.

Example:

Code:

PS1="[\[\033[32m\]\w]\[\033[0m\]\n\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[1;33m\]-> \[\033[0m\]"

6. Show background job count

Another nifty 2-liner, but this one’s got some info we haven’t used before. The first line is the normal user@host, with full path. On the second line we’ve got history number and a count of the jobs running in the background.

Example:

Code:

PS1='\[\e[1;32m\]\u@\H:\[\e[m\] \[\e[1;37m\]\w\[\e[m\]\n\[\e[1;33m\]hist:\! \[\e[0;33m\] \[\e[1;31m\]jobs:\j \$\[\e[m\] '

7. Display directory information

A very elegant and nice looking prompt design. With this one we’ve got user/host, number of jobs, and date/time on the top line. Below that is current directory along with number of files in that directory and their disk usage.

Example:

Code:

PS1="\n\[\e[30;1m\]\[\016\]l\[\017\](\[\e[34;1m\]\u@\h\[\e[30;1m\])-(\[\e[34;1m\]\j\[\e[30;1m\])-(\[\e[34;1m\]\@ \d\[\e[30;1m\])->\[\e[30;1m\]\n\[\016\]m\[\017\]-(\[\[\e[32;1m\]\w\[\e[30;1m\])-(\[\e[32;1m\]\$(/bin/ls -1 | /usr/bin/wc -l | /bin/sed 's: ::g') files, \$(/bin/ls -lah | /bin/grep -m 1 total | /bin/sed 's/total //')b\[\e[30;1m\])--> \[\e[0m\]"

8. My Prompt

And finally, the prompt I personally like to use. It’s a modification of #7, changed to take up less space and include only the information I most want in my prompt. I like the two-line style as it lets me see the full path without reducing the space for my actual commands.

Example:

Code:

PS1="\n\[\e[32;1m\](\[\e[37;1m\]\u\[\e[32;1m\])-(\[\e[37;1m\]jobs:\j\[\e[32;1m\])-(\[\e[37;1m\]\w\[\e[32;1m\])\n(\[\[\e[37;1m\]! \!\[\e[32;1m\])-> \[\e[0m\]"

If you’d like to share your prompt, please do so in the comments below.

Related Posts:

• Making The Linux Command Line A Little Friendlier
• The Beginner Guide to Writing Linux Shell Scripts
• How to Supercharge Your Shell with Bashish [Linux]
• Mastering the Bash History

For those just starting out with Linux, or the command line specifically, the program that displays the command prompt and handles your commands is called bash, or the Bourne Again Shell. In this article we’ll be using the words command line and shell interchangeably to refer to interacting with Linux through bash.

Today we’ll be covering:

• Changing the shell startup routine
• Making a more useful command prompt
• Creating aliases for long or complex commands

.bashrc and .bash_profile

These two files are often the source of some confusion. At first appearance, they seem to do the exact same thing – running startup instructions every time you open a command prompt. In short, .bash_profile runs when you start a shell from a login screen (such as a console system login) and .bashrc runs for non-login shells (such as running Terminal from your system menu). The .bashrc file is the one you’ll be using the majority of the time so that’s the one we’ll use in our examples today.

As I said, .bashrc is loaded by bash whenever you open a new shell. Chances are you already have a .bashrc file that was created for you when you first installed your Linux system. To see what’s already in there, load up your preferred text editor and open

/home/YourUserName/.bashrc

(By default, the file is hidden from public view. You’ll have to right-click and select Show Hidden Files before it can show itself.)

You’ll probably see several lines of code, bash shell scripting to be precise, already in there. The default .bashrc in most distros has some code to do things like color prompts (which we’ll get into a little bit) and some handy aliases (which we’ll get into a lot).

Feel free to glance through the current contents of the file so you have an idea what’s already happening on each new shell session, but for the sake of this article we can safely ignore the current settings and just add what we want to the end.

Instead of putting our new items directly into the .bashrc file, we’re going to take a slightly different approach.  Each user on the system has their own .bashrc file in their home directory. If we wanted to make changes to the way bash runs, we’d have to place our changes in each of those files. If you later decide that what you did wasn’t quite what you wanted, you’d have to go through all of those files again and make your updates. Instead of all that hassle, we’re going to make a single file with all our custom settings, and just tell .bashrc to load from that file.  The diagram below demonstrates:

By placing the source command at the end of the .bashrc file, it will pull our commands in from the custom-shell.sh file and overwrite the default prompt and default aliases with the ones we’ve specified. This way, we can make a single file (/etc/custom-shell.sh or whatever else you’d like to name it) and just tell each user’s .bashrc file to load it. So if you’ve still got your .bashrc file loaded in your text editor, move all the way down to the bottom and add

source /etc/custom-shell.sh

Note – you can take this a step further and add the source line to the .bashrc file in /etc/skel. That way, all new users created on the system will already have our source line included!

Save the .bashrc file and then create a new, blank text file named custom-shell.sh.  This is where we’ll be putting all of the new settings in the following sections.

The Prompt

Every system has a default prompt. Usually, it’s a bland, default prompt with only a little bit of useful information.  It probably looks something like:

josh@roberts:~$

To test out exactly how prompt customisation is done, enter the following into the shell:

export PS1="Custom > "

This will turn your prompt into a simple arrow. No useful info of any kind, but it shows the basic idea of how you change the contents of your prompt.

Over the years, people have taken prompt customisation to the extreme, putting all kinds of info into it. I won’t go into a huge amount of detail on how to handle colors and multi-line prompts and adding live info, but I will give a nice looking, useful prompt that you could use as a base for your own. In the custom-shell.sh file we created earlier, paste in:

export PS1="\n\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\] \[\033[0;36m\]`date`\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] "

Most of what you see there are color codes telling bash to switch back and forth between various colors for the text in the prompt. The end result of all this gibberish is a rather nice looking and easy to understand prompt.

Save the custom-shell.sh file after pasting in the code above. If you save it in /etc, you’ll probably need root privileges. You can save it anywhere you want, but make sure you point your .bashrc to the right place. To test out your new prompt, you can either close and re-open your shell, or just type

source .bashrc

into your current shell.

Your .bashrc file should read our new prompt info from the custom-shell.sh file and make your prompt nice and fancy with colors and all.

For an EXTREMELY detailed guide on prompt magic, see the Official Linux Prompt HOWTO.

Aliases

I might as well tell you up front – I love aliases. The first thing I do when I install a new system is set up my preferred aliases. As the name implies, an alias is just another name for a command. For example, my most used alias is one I call “gimme” which bash translates to “sudo apt-get install”. You can use aliases for a variety of reasons, such as shortening a long command or making the Linux shell act more like a Windows/Mac/Solaris/BSD/Whatever shell. I suggest pasting the following aliases into your custom-shell.sh file. Those who use distros other than Debian/Ubuntu style can translate the apt-get aliases into the appropriate yum command, or whatever package utility you prefer, and of course the same is true for aptitude and portage users.

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#
#Apt-related aliases
#
alias gimme="sudo apt-get install"            #Install new software
alias acs="apt-cache search"                    #Search available packages
alias purge="apt-get --purge remove"        #Removes package and its config files
alias update="sudo apt-get update"
alias debclean="sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoremove"  #Removes some unneeded files
#
#Misc useful aliases
#
alias ls="ls --color=auto"                           #Plain ls with color
alias ll="ls -l --color=auto"                         #Detailed list with color
alias config="dpkg-reconfigure"                #Re-run the configuration step for a package
alias cmi="./configure && make && sudo make install"    #Common steps to install package from source
alias numfiles="echo $(ls -1 | wc -l)"          #Count the number of files in current directory
alias dfree="df -h"                                       #See how much hard drive space is free in easy-to-read format
alias favdir="cd /directory/you/use/a/lot"   #Quickly switch to a directory you often need (music, documents, etc)

Add whatever else you think might be useful, or change the ones I’ve suggested to suit your needs. Instead of gimme and acs, you could use get and got. Some people transitioning from Windows like to make aliases to mimic Windows commands: copy to replace cp, move to replace mv, ipconfig to replace ifconfig, etc.

Your custom-shell.sh should now look something like this:

Once the custom-shell.sh file is saved, and .bashrc is set to point to it, re-open your command prompt and you should have a nice looking, useful prompt with several handy aliases to make things a little easier.

I would love to hear about you favorite aliases! Leave a comment and share some useful command shortcuts you’ve found, or maybe a nice prompt. The command line can be a very powerful tool, and I’d love to know ways you’ve found to make it even better.

Related Posts:

• 8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts
• The Beginner Guide to Writing Linux Shell Scripts
• 7 Linux Shell Tips For Increased Productivity
• How to Supercharge Your Shell with Bashish [Linux]