Setting your terminal title in bash

March 9, 2006

I didn’t really want to write three articles about bash in a row, but after my last article about Bash prompts Ralph Aichinger emailed me asking about a feature he had in zsh, where his xterms show him the current process and whether it was possible to do that in Bash. Never one to refuse a challenge, I had a go and my latest article is the result.

Filed under computing

Tagged article bash prompt shell terminal xterm title

4 comments

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MattK — March 10, 2006

You should add a c to your echo command so you dont' get spurious newlines.

trap 'echo -e "e]0;$BASH_COMMAND07"' DEBUG
becomes
trap 'echo -e "e]0;$BASH_COMMAND07c"' DEBUG

JD — March 10, 2006

Yes, crap, I'd forgotten I'd added on a -n to echo to fix that. Thanks for reminding me. I've updated the article.

JanP — June 13, 2008

Hi,
I liked having the command in the terminal window.
It looks however like it is messing up things like this:

cd $( pwd )

Using rxvt on cygwin gives an error when running the above. Apparantly because the terminal title string is prepended to the output of pwd.

Eee — February 18, 2016

If BASH_COMMAND has some parts that are back-ticked, they will get executed, which may damage whatever is trying to run.
It may also send error messages (this is what made the phenomenon visible in the first place).
Any way to expand BASH_COMMAND to a string value without executing anything?