OpenSSH connection doent display Path or Name

Question

I recently re-installed a Ubuntu server (12.10) and I happened to have a minor issue with OpenSSH.

Once I created some new Accounts and logged into those the terminal always replys with "$". Contrary to the root account, which usually prompts with "Name@Server Path:".

So, how exactly did I disable the path and name displaying for normal accounts? I'd like to have it back.

Answer 1

The most common reason for this happening is that the shell profile for the new users doesn't have any settings to adjust the shell prompt; plus it also depends on the shell that is configured for the user.

when I do:

useradd -m freddy

Then su - freddy, I get the prompt

$

and the ps listing:

$ ps
 PID TTY          TIME CMD
7258 pts/28   00:00:00 su
7266 pts/28   00:00:00 sh
7300 pts/28   00:00:00 ps

i.e. not using bash.

if we add the user with the bash shell,

userdel -r freddy
useradd -m -s /bin/bash freddy
su - freddy

we get the prompt:

freddy@host:~$

If you want to modify the login shell of the user accounts so that they will have a prompt, then you can do:

usermod -s /bin/bash <account name>

for each of the accounts.

Again, all the useradd, userdel and usermod commands are performed as root!

Answer 2

This issue is not related to OpenSSH. The shell prompt is based on the PS1 environment variable. If you want to reset your shell prompt to "Name@Server Path:" add below lines in .bashrc or .bash_profile or .profile

   PS1="\u@\h:\w"

For more ways of setting (colourful) prompts refer here