Question

I am working with bash and still unfamiliar with the difference between .profile, .bashrc, .bash_profile.

My desired result is to have the ruby version and rvm gemset show up on my bash prompt.

I added PS1="\$(~/.rvm/bin/rvm-prompt) $PS1" to .bash_profile (via xcode) and it displays

ruby-1.9.3-p286 John-MacBook-Air:~ john$

What I trying to get is

ruby-1.9.3-p286@rails3 $

With “rails3” being the output of rvm gemset.

How do I get John-MacBook-Air:~ john removed from the prompt?

I tried adding the line in the .profile, and .bashrc with no luck but it seems to work in the .bash_profile. Any clarification between these files would be greatly appreciated. I am running rvm on a Mac.

SOLUTION

include the following to the .bash_profile

PS1='\W \$ '
PS1="\$(~/.rvm/bin/rvm-prompt) $PS1"

the prompt looks like

ruby-1.9.3-p286@rails3 ~ $ 

Answer 1

This line is the problem:

PS1="\$(~/.rvm/bin/rvm-prompt) $PS1"

What you’re saying there is “add my rvm prompt to PS1” and then put the pre-existing PS1 at the end. The system’s default PS1 is setting this:

PS1='\h:\W \u\$ '

In that setting \h is the hostname (here ‘John-MacBook-Air’), \W is the current working directory with your home directory abbreviated to ~, \u is your user’s login name (here ‘john’) and \$ will show a dollar sign if you are a regular user and an octothorpe (#) if you’re logged in as root. On OSX, that is set by default in /etc/bashrc. If you want to change the prompt, you need to customize the latter part of the prompt rather than just re-entering $PS1 as is back into the new setting. Removing the hostname is common, but I would very strongly recommend against removing the current working directory. It’s very useful information when in a terminal session. Just my two cents.

To see what you can put there, take a look for information about setting your prompt in Bash.