Question

I’m doing some work on a server that runs CentOS at the moment, and the prompt looks different from the Ubuntu bash command line. I initially thought it was a different shell, but echo $SHELL showed me that it was still bash.

I was mainly wondering whether this is a configuration thing, and where this is set up, for example, my ubuntu bash prompt:

tom@tom-PC:~$

compared with the CentOS bash command prompt:

[root@server217-174-254-199 ~]#

Aside from the obvious differences in machine name and user (and the # caused by being logged in as root) CentOS has [ ~] around the user@machine whereas ubuntu prefers a simple :~ before the prompt

Answer 1

It’s a question of taste: everyone can configure his PROMPT-line with the env-variable PS1.

For example:

PS1='\u@\h:\w$'

gives

user@host:directory$

whereas directory is ‘~’ for your home-dir.