Here is a cool trick to make your bash prompt look like a dos prompt. Why would you do it? You shouldn’t; unless you have something for dos prompts. But you could always do this to fool your coworkers or friends and give them a moment of, “WTF”? (I know I will)

Many people don’t think of their command prompt as a particularly useful thing, or even pay it much attention. To me, this is a bit of a shame, as a useful prompt can change the way you use the command line.

In a recent text configuring colors for the Bash prompt was discussed. In this text a method of messing with the prompt is expanded upon by actually inserting a shell code function inline with the bash prompt.

So how do you setup, change and pimp out Linux / UNIX shell prompt?

Most of us work with a shell prompt. By default most Linux distro displays hostname and current working directory. You can easily customize your prompt to display information important to you.

Type history at the Bash command prompt, and you'll get a list of your previous commands. You can navigate through these with the up and down arrows, but there are other ways of interacting with them that I've been investigating this week.

In this context, a one-liner is a set of commands normally joined through a pipe (|). When joined by a pipe, the command on the left passes its output to the command on the right. Simple or complex, you can get useful results from a single line at the bash command prompt.

Bash is the default command line interface for many Linux distributions and a powerful scripting language. Here are some suggestions that will keep your Bash scripts efficient and lean. Feel free to comment with your own suggestions.

The concept is fairly simple. Schedule a custom php script under crontab that will parse a weather rss feed and create a file containing weather info that we can use in our custom prompt.

If you're not afraid of the command line, take a peek at Bash Blogger. As its name implies, this application is a bash script that automates all of your blogging tasks (aside from writing, of course). Bash Blogger's shell scripts come in a 36KB archive.