Shell startup scripts

bash startup scripts

See bash for a discussion on what bash runs under what circumstances.

Color prompt

I generally find it useful to have a file called .colors in my home directory, to help colorize prompts without being too arcane.

# .colors
BLACK="\[\033[0;30m\]"
BLUE="\[\033[0;34m\]"
BROWN="\[\033[0;33m\]"
COLORCLEAR="\[\033[0m\]"
CYAN="\[\033[0;36m\]"
DARKGRAY="\[\033[1;30m\]"
GREEN="\[\033[0;32m\]"
LIGHTBLUE="\[\033[1;34m\]"
LIGHTCYAN="\[\033[1;36m\]"
LIGHTGRAY="\[\033[0;37m\]"
LIGHTGREEN="\[\033[1;32m\]"
LIGHTPURPLE="\[\033[1;35m\]"
LIGHTRED="\[\033[1;31m\]"
PURPLE="\[\033[0;35m\]"
RED="\[\033[0;31m\]"
WHITE="\[\033[1;37m\]"
YELLOW="\[\033[1;33m\]"

Then, something like this is typically in my .bash_profile:

. ~/.colors
PS1="$BLUE[$WHITE\u$GREEN@$WHITE\h $LIGHTRED\w$BLUE]$GREEN\$ $COLORCLEAR"
case $TERM in
    xterm*)
        PS1="\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\]$PS1"
        ;;
    *)
        ;;
esac

The PS1 assignment in the case statement prepends another string to the prompt to tell the titlebar of an xterm what it is supposed to say.