Re: PS1 \W behaviour: how to get the "old" way back?

[Chet Ramey]

> In bash-3.0 this was added:
> 
> kk. The `\W' prompt expansion now abbreviates $HOME as `~', like `\w'.
> 
> It seems that a large number of people preferred things the way they
> were before, with \W giving the basename with no tilde abbreviation.
> 
> Since there is no easy way of achieving this without resorting to
> PROMPT_COMMAND, could there be a new escape sequence added for it?

Unless I'm reading this wrong, ${PWD##*/} does the job (though it fails
if PWD == '/').  You can always use $(basename $PWD).

It's the current behavior that's tough to do using shell expansions.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
( ``Discere est Dolere'' -- chet )
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Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.tis.cwru.edu/~chet/