I am quite new to Linux and I was wondering how to change the following when in terminal permanently. When I set up my computer I used a name that I now want to change:
In terminal, the name I want to change would be of this form:
TheNameIWantToChange@HostName ~ $
So my question is, what exactly is this name and how do I go about changing it? Thanks!
If I understand correctly you'd like to change your user name.
usermod -l TheNameIWantToChange -d /home/TheNameIWantToChange -m CurrentName
usermod : modify an account
-l : change the name
-d : chnage the location (name) of the home directory
-m : move the contents of the current home dir to the new one
E.g. suppose current name is albert and you'd like to change it to benny:
sudo usermod -l benny -d /home/benny -m albert
As an added bonus, you can use environment variables:
NewUser="benny"
sudo usermod -l ${NewUser} -d /home/${NewUser} -m $USER
usermod(8) manual, such as crontab or at job files, etc.
ps -q 2559? In any event, it seems like the user TheNameIWantToChange already exists on your system. To make it clearer, can you list all the users you created (not system created users)?
Alternatively if you don't want to change your username and you're just interested in changing what you see at your prompt there you can alter the PS1 environmental variable.
PS1 is a variable that Bourne shell uses to set how your terminal is displayed. You can customize it in a few ways:
For testing I'd recommend just altering the variable from within your session, that way if you don't like the changes you can easily fix them.
export PS1="\h:\w\$"
Where \h is hostname, \w is the current working directory and \$ is just a dollar sign. So you will see HOSTNAME:/path/to/current/dir$ You could also set some custom message:
export PS1="MYMESSAGE@\h:\w\$"
If you like what you see then you can change it permanently by alter your .bashrc file. To do this use your editor of choice and open the file ~/.bashrc
look for the following:
if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
fi
and get rid of the \u@:
if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\h:\w\$ '
fi
