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I'm trying to change my command prompt to display my current working directory, but it doesn't work for me. I have tried putting this in my bash_profile which is in my home directory:
PS1='\h:\w$ '
PS1='\h:$PWD \u$ '
and my prompt does change but it just shows the same as I'm putting in so it doesn't recognize things like \h and \w i think?
I'm running macOS Catalina 10.15.6
You are using zsh so the definition needs to go to .zshrc and it's slightly different (see man zshmisc for all options). The equivalent for \h \w \$ in zsh is
PS1='%m %~%# '
%m The hostname up to the first '.'. An integer may follow the % to specify how many
components of the hostname are desired. With a negative integer, trailing components of
the hostname are shown.%~ Current working directory. If an integer follows the %, it specifies a number of
trailing components of the current working directory to show; zero means the whole path.
If the current working directory starts with $HOME, that part is
replaced by a ~%# A # if the shell is running with privileges, a % if not.
~ is the shorthand for your user directory. ~/ refers to the same folder as /Users/yourusername/, and you can print your working directory at any point with pwd. Apologies if this is going above my head, and if what you're looking to have the full system path printed in place of the conventional user@ComputerName ~. I am unsure how to do that or why exactly you'd need to. Also, just ensuring you did touch ~/.zshrc after updating the file.
\h \w \$ in bash: MacBook-Pro, is your hostname, ~ the current directory and % is the result of %# for a non-root user. What did you expect?
In my case it works if I insert the following the .zshrc (then source .zshrc):
PS1='%1~>'
in this was it only shows the current name of the directory (not the full path), here an example how it looks like:
Documents>
