mac terminal - remove text prefixing dollar sign

Question

Does anyone know how to remove the text prefixing the dollar sign in mac terminal?

For example,

Peters-MacBook-Pro:~ peter$ ls my_dir

should become

$ ls my_dir

Solution 1

The prompt is usually configured in the PS1 environment variable. PS2, PS3, and PS4 are all used in other locations, and you might wish to modify them at some point. To get a much nicer prompt, set your PS1 in your shell startup files, typically ~/.bashrc:

export PS1='\$ '  # Note ' quotes rather than " quotes

Using \$ will change the prompt to # when uid==0 -- e.g.:

$ sudo -s
# 
# exit
$ 

Very helpful hint before executing that rm -r * command.

There's many more things you can stuff into your PS1:

          \a     an ASCII bell character (07)
          \d     the date in "Weekday Month Date" format
                 (e.g., "Tue May 26")
          \D{format}
                 the format is passed to strftime(3) and the
                 result is inserted into the prompt string; an
                 empty format results in a locale-specific
                 time representation.  The braces are required
          \e     an ASCII escape character (033)
          \h     the hostname up to the first `.'
          \H     the hostname
          \j     the number of jobs currently managed by the
                 shell
          \l     the basename of the shell's terminal device
                 name
          \n     newline
          \r     carriage return
          \s     the name of the shell, the basename of $0
                 (the portion following the final slash)
          \t     the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
          \T     the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
          \@     the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
          \A     the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
          \u     the username of the current user
          \v     the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
          \V     the release of bash, version + patch level
                 (e.g., 2.00.0)
          \w     the current working directory, with $HOME
                 abbreviated with a tilde (uses the value of
                 the PROMPT_DIRTRIM variable)
          \W     the basename of the current working
                 directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a
                 tilde
          \!     the history number of this command
          \#     the command number of this command
          \$     if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
          \nnn   the character corresponding to the octal
                 number nnn
          \\     a backslash
          \[     begin a sequence of non-printing characters,
                 which could be used to embed a terminal
                 control sequence into the prompt
          \]     end a sequence of non-printing characters

Some people love adding color to their prompts. I find it distracting, and each time I've tried, I wind up turning it off again in a few minutes. But some people love bling. :)

Solution 2

Do it just like you would in any other bash console, execute:

PS1="$ "

Comments

[karlphillip]

If you want to make this change permanent, open your ~/.bashrc file and add: export PS1="$ " Then, open a new terminal to test it.