Understanding Bash (Part 2)

I like to customise my BASH prompt to be a bit more colourful and informative. You can also do it. But before that you must understand some basis syntax. There are more to the options below


Selected Options for Bash Prompt:
\h (Hostname)
\u (Username of the current user)
\w (current working directory, with the top-level directory as ~)
\W (base name of the current working directory, with top-level directory as ~)


How do we get BASH to look like below under CentOS
[root@test ~/scratch/tmp]$
# vim .bashrc
# export PS1='\e[1;33m[\u@\h \w]\$ \e[m'

\e[a;bm \e[m
(marks the start of the character the colour apply to.)
(a;bm is the color code)
(a can have a value of both 0 and 1. 1 will be the lighter colour of the 0)

For Color Codes, see Changing Colour for ls on BASH Blog

Special Feature Writeup of ISC09

A good collection of Articles and Commentaries dedicated to ISC 09 Conference
HPCwire's special section dedicated to ISC09

Grand unification of supercomputing and cloud computing?

There were a posting by Michael Feldman, editor of HPCwire on the title High Performance Cloud Computing Still an Oxymoron.

A good article where experts provide differing view on the feasibility of Cloud Computing on HPC infrastructure.

Understanding Bash (Part 1)

When you logged on there are 4 files that are associated with BASH

• .bash_history (list of previously entered commands)
• .bash_logout (run a script when Bash exit)
• .bashrc (basic settings for prompt actions)
• .bash_profile (additional configuration. If .bash_profile is not present, the user account will use /etc/profile)

Adding a Directory to a Path
To add a directory to a path, edit the .bash_profile
$ vim .bash_profile

------------------------------
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
export PATH
------------------------------

Putting Aliases
One of the appropriate place to put aliases is in .bashrc

Using mrxvt

mrxvt is a cool alternative terminal emulator. It is extremely flexible and the most interesting feature is the tabbed-oriented design. mrxvt can be easily obtained from a number of distribution.

For more information,

• mrxvt project site
• Juggling Shells (by Linux Magazine)