Odd text before “:” in Terminal

Question

In Terminal.app I have a text prompt like the following

rover-205-89:Documents username$ 

What is the "rover-205-89"? I thought it was my computer name but I looked under System Preferences > Sharing and that isn't it.

Answer 1

That is your computer's hostname. In Terminal type the command hostname and that is what you'll see. You can change the host name with the command sudo scutil --set HostName desired-host-name. There are some networking scenarios where this won't permanently fix the problem, though. (e.g. OS X assumes hostname of other network computer: how to prevent this?). It happens with my machine at work (on a Windows domain). Aside from being a little disconcerting, there are no functional repercussions that I've experienced.