trim the terminal command prompt working directory

Question

When using the terminal in a deep folder structure sometimes the prompt can take up most of the line. Is there any way in which I can trim the working directory? I know I can do

PS1="\W >"

to only print the current directory and not the full path, but is there a way to have something like:

/home/smauel/de...ther/folder >

Answer 1

Create a small python scrip which implements the desired trimming logic.

Example: ~/short.pwd.py

import os
from commands import getoutput
from socket import gethostname
hostname = gethostname()
username = os.environ['USER']
pwd = os.getcwd()
homedir = os.path.expanduser('~')
pwd = pwd.replace(homedir, '~', 1)
if len(pwd) > 30:
    pwd = pwd[:10]+'...'+pwd[-20:] # first 10 chars+last 20 chars
print '[%s@%s:%s] ' % (username, hostname, pwd)

Now test it, from a terminal:

export PROMPT_COMMAND='PS1="$(python ~/.short.pwd.py)"'

If you are ok with the result just append the command into your ~/.bashrc

Answer 2

Look through the solutions at stackoverflow.

Answer 3

Another way around that problem is to include a line break into PS1, so that the working directory and the actual prompt appear on separate lines, for example:

PS1="\w\n>"

Answer 4

If you are using bash4 (Ubuntu 9.10 and newer has bash4), the easiest option is to just set the PROMPT_DIRTRIM variable. e.g.:

PROMPT_DIRTRIM=2

For one similar to João Pinto's example, (that'll work in older bash versions and ensures that the path component is never longer than 30 characters), you could do something like this:

PS1='[\u@\h:$(p=${PWD/#"$HOME"/~};((${#p}>30))&&echo "${p::10}…${p:(-19)}"||echo "\w")]\$ '