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From Arnout Engelen

Contents 1 Xterm titles 1.1 Manually 1.2 Automatically when executing commands from bash 1.3 Automatically when showing the bash prompt

[edit] Xterm titles

[edit] Manually

You can update xterm titles with:

 echo -ne "\e]0;yourtitle\007"

(but remember your bash might be configured to reset it again immediately)

[edit] Automatically when executing commands from bash

You can convince bash to update the title with the current command with:

trap 'echo -en "\e]0;$BASH_COMMAND\007"' DEBUG

(thanks to http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/xterm-titles-with-bash.html )

[edit] Automatically when showing the bash prompt

To show the CWD. There's 2 ways to do this, putting the sequences directly into PS1:

PS1='\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD/$HOME/~}\007${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '

Or adding a PROMPT_COMMAND:

PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD/$HOME/~}\007"'

The 'PROMPT_COMMAND' sort of seems neater, but will also be 'trapped' by the 'trap' set above, and thus will trigger a problem because in that case the $BASH_COMMAND contains a \007 character.

The 'PS1' solution seems to cause some trouble when the current directory is a long string and the xterm is not very wide. have to look into that.