Halloween Bash Profile Generator | Hacker News Reader

Halloween Bash Profile Generator

xta.github.com

79 pointslanger26 comments

One option that is missing that I really thing is useful is

    wincolour=$yellow
    errorcolour=$red
    # To provide a coloured version of $?, wrapped in ().  Used in PS1
    pretty_exit_code(){
      LAST_COMMAND_STATUS=$?
      if [ $LAST_COMMAND_STATUS = 0 ];
      then echo -e "$wincolour($LAST_COMMAND_STATUS)$black";
      else echo -e "$errorcolour($LAST_COMMAND_STATUS)$black";
      fi
    }

Which just provides the exit code of the last command, but coloured differently for failure or success.

Interesting. I've been using $PIPESTATUS at the start of my prompt for a while now.

I use this, which allows a similar effect but is enabled for PIPESTATUS, and also does some good things for eterm and screen.

   PIPESTATUS_REGEX="^ +$"

   # check to see if any of the pipe statuses don't start with 0
   # ${_CMD_PIPESTATUS[@]#0} results in null if they all do
   _PIPESTATUS="
       _CMD_PIPESTATUS=(\${PIPESTATUS[@]})
       if [[ \"\${_CMD_PIPESTATUS[*]#0}\" && ! \"\${_CMD_PIPESTATUS[*]#0}\" =~ \$PIPESTATUS_REGEX ]]
       then
           _RES_STR=\" [\${_CMD_PIPESTATUS[*]}]\";
       else
           _RES_STR=''
       fi"

    export PROMPT_COMMAND="$_PIPESTATUS; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

    if [[ $TERM = screen || $_TERM = screen ]]; then
        _RESET_PROMPT="\[\033k\033\\\\\]"
    else
        _RESET_PROMPT=""
    fi

    if [ $TERM = "eterm-color" ]; then
        # XXX: this is going to break things when you start
        # use $INSIDE_EMACS to test whether we should use \u?
        _ETERM_PROMPT="\[\033AnSiTu \u\012\033AnSiTc \w\012\033AnSiTh \H\012\]"
    else
        _ETERM_PROMPT=""
    fi

    export PS1="\n$_ETERM_PROMPT\[\033[32m\]\u@\h \[\033[33m\]\w\[\033[35m\]\$_RES_STR\[\033[0m\]\n${_RESET_PROMPT}\\$ "
    unset _RESET_PROMPT

It's cool to also see the name of the signal that caused exit status > 128. Sadly this only fits in a tweet if it can assume the possible signal names are listed contiguously, which isn't so on 64-bit Linux these days.

  S=(`trap -l`);e(){ for N in ${PIPESTATUS[@]};do ((N>128))&&echo ${S[$((2*N-257))]}||echo $N;done;};trap $'echo "\e[41m Exit "`e`" \e[m"' ERR

That's a great idea. I've rewritten my own version to use these signals instead of numbers where possible.

Just added exit status to the page. Thanks for the suggestion.

Nice!

A bug report, space tokens should not exhaust. Currently you can at max have 2 spaces, the one that is in the config by default and one from the available tokens.

Thanks for opening up an issue in the repo.

Same for the other single characters.

Where is the @ character?? How am I going to make the classic prompt?

    user@comp:Folder$

Thanks to WillBooth, you're now able to use the @ character. I've merged in his pull request https://github.com/xta/HalloweenBash/pull/5

Brilliant idea. Well done! Change the name because this will be useful throughout the full year.

Hey everyone,

Thanks for checking out the bash profile generator! I'm a student at Flatiron School[1] NYC (where we have electricity in NYC, no small feat today) and this project came about when we were learning to setup our CLIs in the first week.

Please let me know if you have any comments/feedback on twitter: @rexfeng

[1] http://flatironschool.com/

Fun project!

I balked, however, at "deciphering web pages to do simple things like displaying the time". All of the prompt escape codes are on the bash man page. That's not a criticism, mind you[1] - just a pointer at the fact that as you develop as a command-line guru, you'll find much information is right there at your finger tips in man pages.

Best of luck in your studies!

[1] No, really. I spend all my life on the command line - it's second nature to me. On the other hand, I wouldn't have a clue where to begin to do a little web app like yours - which probably makes me an amusing old oddity on HN :)

For bash, the info documentation is probably better than man, but as someone who is very familiar with it, I would say it sometimes needs a little deciphering.

I think it might be better if you could insert text in directly in prompt instead of having the slew of special characters that you had to drag in, and that ran out.

It would also be good to have a way to colour specific parts of it different colours.

Very nice! Not sure why it's halloween tho, should be named something else :)

"Halloween Bash" as in a Halloween party, I'm guessing. Not exactly a 'timeless' name, but seeing as it was put up on Halloween...

Very nice. I sort of with there was an easy way to do fish style prompt paths in bash (/home/username/bin -> /h/u/bin), but that's hardly this excellent website's fault. I guess I'm just annoyed at being tied to bash due to ROS.

Here's one from the Arch mailing list. Also does the ~ expansion for home directories: http://www.mail-archive.com/arch-general@archlinux.org/msg07...

Thanks! With this complementing the git status function I already had, my prompt is now 20% cooler.

I love this idea - especially for those that are unfamiliar with BASH yet still want to customize their command line experience. Unfortunately due to a previous HN article I now use zsh - would love to see a zsh prompt generator too!

At first I wondered how you managed to extract my username and then I realized it was hardcoded when I looked through the code.

Great impleentation, but its odd that there a limited number of elements you might want many, like spaces.

As ugly as awesome ;)

Congrats Avi. Your students are killing it.

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