The format is copied mostly from bash(1) because that's what it is supposed to be compatible with. We
made some private extensions which obviously are not portable.
Note that this is not the prompt format as specified by the posix specification, that would only know "!"
for the history number and "!!" for a literal "!".
Apart from the escape sequences you can also use environment variables in the format string; use $VAR or
"${VAR}".
The following escape sequences are recognized:
\a The bell character, identical to "\007"
\d The date in "Weekday Month Date" format
\D{format}
The date in strftime(3) format, uses POSIX
\e The escape character, identical to "\033"
\n Newline
\r Carriage return
\s The basename of $0
\t The current time in 24-hour format, identical to "\D{%H:%M:%S}"
\T The current time in 12-hour format, identical to "\D{%I:%M:%S}"
\@ The current time in 12-hour am/pm format, identical to "\D{%I:%M %p}"
\A The current time in short 24-hour format, identical to "\D{%H:%M}"
\u The username of the current user
\w The current working directory
\W The basename of the current working directory
\$ "#" for effective uid is 0 (root), else "$"
\0dd
The character corresponding to the octal number 0dd
\\ Literal backslash
\H Hostname, uses Sys::Hostname
\h First part of the hostname
\l The basename of the (output) terminal device name, uses POSIX, but won't be really portable.
\[ \]
These are used to encapsulate a sequence of non-printing chars. Since we don't need that, they are
removed.
Extensions
The following escapes are extensions not supported by bash, and are not portable:
\L The (output) terminal device name, uses POSIX, but won't be really portable.
\C{colour}
Insert the ANSI sequence for named colour. Known colours are: black, red, green, yellow, blue,
magenta, cyan and white; background colours prefixed with "on_". Also known are reset, bold, dark,
underline, blink and reverse, although the effect depends on the terminla you use.
Unless you want the whole commandline coloured you should end your prompt with "\C{reset}".
Of course you can still use the "raw" ansi escape codes for these colours.
Note that "bold" is sometimes also known as "bright", so "\C{bold,black}" will on some terminals
render dark grey.
If the environment variable "CLICOLOR" is defined but false colours are switched off automatically.
\P{format}
Proc information.
Alloftheseareunixspecific
%a Acpi AC status '+' or '-' for connected or not, linux specific
%b Acpi battery status in mWh, linux specific
%L Load average
%l First number of the load average
%t Acpi temperature, linux specific
%u Uptime
%w Number of users logged in
Notimplementedescapes
The following escapes are not implemented, because they are application specific.
\j The number of jobs currently managed by the application.
\v The version of the application.
\V The release number of the application, version + patchelvel
\! The history number of the next command.
This escape gets replaced by literal '!' while a literal '!' gets replaces by '!!'; this makes the
string a posix compatible prompt, thus it will work if your readline module expects a posix prompt.
\# The command number of the next command (like history number, but minus the lines read from the
history file).
Customizing
If you want to overload escapes or want to supply values for the application specific escapes you can put
them in %Env::PS1::map, the key is the escape letter, the value either a string or a CODE ref. If you map
a CODE ref it normally is called every time the prompt string is read. When the escape is followed by an
argument in the format string (like "\D{argument}") the CODE ref is called only once when the string is
cached, but in that case it may in turn return a CODE ref.
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