Insert empty line between command line prompts

Question

When using the command line, often it gets very cluttered. Making it inconvenient to examine past commands and their outputs for example.

I would like to have a newline added each time before the command prompt is shown. Like so:

<clutter>
<blank line>
name@machine:~$

I use the bash shell. How can this be achieved?

Answer 1

One way to achieve this is by modifying the .bashrc file. Simply place the following at the end of the .bashrc file.

PS1="\n$PS1"

To explain how this works, PS1 is the variable containing what should be displayed as the prompt. All this is saying is "set PS1 to the previous contents of PS1, with a newline character prepended". Putting it in .bashrc on most distros just makes bash run it every time you open an interactive shell (but not a login shell - see Difference between Login Shell and Non-Login Shell?).

Answer 2

You can use PROMPT_COMMAND:

PROMPT_COMMAND="printf '\n';$PROMPT_COMMAND"

or:

PROMPT_COMMAND="echo;$PROMPT_COMMAND"

Answer 3

Alternative: leave a line in the PS1= prompt of your .bashrc. Here's literally how I set up .bashrc on every linux machine I have:

PS1=' 
serg@ubuntu [$(pwd)]
================================
$ '

As you see in my example above, username is hardcoded into the prompt. You can of course use escape sequences that bash or another shell (e.g. ksh) provides, but a little more neutral option would be to do use parameter substitution with commands like whoami (report your username) and hostname(obviously, reports hostname). For instance:

PS1='
$(whoami)@$(hostname):$(pwd)
$ '

For more fun stuff with the prompt, .bashrc, and parameter expansions, check out my answers here:

How to check battery status using terminal?

How can I get my terminals / shells to have custom designs in it? and

How to show a running clock in terminal before the command prompt?