From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020607 Description of problem: The default bash prompt doesn't contain leading directories. It only comes with the name of the current directory. I find this quite confusing. I would like to have the default PS1 changed to include the whole path to the current directory. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install (any?) Redhat. 2. Log in. 3. Change directory to /usr/local/bin. 4. Look at your prompt. Actual Results: The prompt says I'm in "bin", but not whether I am in /usr/bin, /bin or /usr/local/bin. Expected Results: The prompt should say I'm in /usr/local/bin. Additional info: This has been a problem since way back. I assume you are doing it on purpose for some (unknown to me) reason. I find it very annoying (YMMV). Also, I know I can change it for myself, but having had to change this for all Redhat machines I get to since at least 5.something is starting to get to me. Severity "normal" as this is a usability bug. Change if you don't agree.
First of all, Red Hat uses this problem for like half of a decade, if I remember correctly? And maybe this is still a good approach, since the prompt is not meant to be a replacement of /bin/pwd. For example, if you are in /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/5.0/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/SystemResources/X, I at least would not think that a about 80 character wide prompt would be of any help, since you have to type in your command on the second line. Having to type "pwd" sometimes to figure out your exact working directory seems to me to be small sacrifice, rather than to face 80+ character long prompts. On some ksh based Unix systems (like HP/UX), you do have such a behavior of having a full path in the prompt, which is quite annoying. If you like the longer prompt, you can always redefine PS1="[\u@\h \w]\$ " export PS1 (lowercase w as compared to uppercase W) in .bashrc or .bash_profile.
Ups, sorry. Mistyped "prompt" as "problem" in the first line. ;-)
The default prompt isn't going to be changed at this point.