CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ubuntuterminaltitle
I Z
I Z

Reputation: 5927

Ubuntu: How to I add string to terminal window title from command line?

I am working on a Ubuntu VM where i have multiple terminal windows open at the same time. I switch between them many times and it's hard to keep track of which window has which purpose. So what I want to do is to issue some sort of command from the command line that would permanently alter the title of the window. One approach is to modify the following line in .bashrc to, say, add the word FOO to the title:

PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@${InstName}:FOO:\w\a\]$PS1"

Then I would do source .bashrc. The problem is that I only have one .bashrc and many windows. So if I open two windows one after another without changing the line in .bashrc, I'll have FOO in both of them. So I want to issue a command from each window instead. How do I do that?

NOTE: The stuff around FOO in the PS1 line above is important too, so what I want is to essentially add a window-specific string to the generic PS1 specification above.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3013

Answers (3)

Tony Wall
Tony Wall

Reputation: 1412

This similar question has a far better answer from "trtayloriv", explaining the most direct way to set it and why it doesn't work until you edit the PS1 environment variable which is set in the "~/.bashrc" file. Then also how you can add a function to avoid having to remember the cryptic echo command.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/30988/how-do-you-set-the-title-of-the-active-gnome-terminal-from-the-command-line

This is different (perhaps better) because instead of setting the title outside/before starting the terminal/script you can more decisively set the title as part of the script itself. For me at least that's more deterministic because my scripts already know what they are doing and I simply want them to identify themselves clearly no matter how I ran them (double-click from desktop or start via another terminal session).

Upvotes: 0

jhole
jhole

Reputation: 4226

Use $$ to get the PID:

PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@${InstName}:PID$$:\w\a\]$PS1"

Edit

you can define a variable mytitle 

PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@${InstName}:$mytitle:\w\a\]$PS1"

and spawn new terminals with new title

export mytitle=WINDOW1 && gnome-terminal
export mytitle=WINDOW2 && gnome-terminal

Upvotes: 1

TeTeT
TeTeT

Reputation: 2094

It is not entirely clear if you want to change the window title or the tab title. For the window title, see https://askubuntu.com/questions/22413/how-to-change-gnome-terminal-title wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -N "MyWindowTitle"

Upvotes: 0

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