How to show only the parent folder in the shell prompt

Question

Whenever I go inside a directory in Linux, it shows the file path at prompt like:

root@vivek-HP-Pavilion-dv6-Notebook-PC:/var/www/abc/def/

How can I change it to show short names instead?

Assuming you use bash, what's the value of your PS1 variable? What would you like your prompt to be instead?
[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$
You can safely keep the old one and just change the \w to \W too.

slhck · Accepted Answer · 2011-08-08 17:19:15Z

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Add the following to ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile (whatever you have or want – what is the difference?):

PS1="\u@\h:\W $ "

This will produce:

werner@charon:Documents $ cd /etc/paths.d/
werner@charon:paths.d $

edited Aug 8 '11 at 17:19

answered Aug 8 '11 at 17:06

slhck♦
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