PS1 overwrites attempt to change title, settitle in bash or rxvt title

[bnelson at austin dot ibm dot com]

This message is more for just getting into the archives to help any newbies like me in the future. I was trying to set the title of my cygwin and rxvt windows and was not having any luck.  I followed the instructions to echo something like:

	echo -e "\033]2;New Title\007"

but it never seemed to work.  It would only show the default cygwin title of the current path (/cygdrive/c/...).  I was trying everything I could think of, then I changed PS1 to be something different and I could now set the title. It turns out the default PS1 in cygwin/etc/profile sets PS1 to include "\033]0;\w\007".  That string is the terminal code to set the title.  So anytime I did something to set the title, the evaulation of PS1 would overwrite it.  So anyone having a problem setting the title should look at their PS1 variable.

(In case anyone doesn't know, PS1 is the shell environment variable which controls what your command prompt looks like.)

Also, I saw references to use the settitle function found in the default bashrc (cygwin/etc/defaults/etc/skel).  That didn't work because the characters in the function are exactly:

	echo -n "^[]2;$@^G^[]1;$@^G";

Where the ^ are actual carat characters.  That is, ^[ are the two characters 'carat' and '[' as opposed to the single character ESC. The same with ^G.

-Brian





    









--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/