AIX

When you log on to an AIX workstation you have a ksh (actually ksh88) as default login shell. Use a ksh manual if you need more information than provided here - everything in there applies to your AIX prompt as well.

I dislike the long prompts because they leave little space to type commands. As i usually work in an X environment i exploit some properties of the usual X-terminal-emulators and set the prompt with the following scriptlet to display hostname, user and PWD in the title bar. Notice that "^[" in the following text stands for a literal <ESC> character (in vi press <CTRL>-<V> to enter a control character, then press <ESC>, similar for "^G" [literal CTRL-G] and "^M" [literal CTRL-M]):

Code:

case $TERM in
     aixterm)
          PS1='^[];$LOGNAME@$HOST:$PWD^G^M# '
          ;;

     dtterm)
          PS1='^[]0;$LOGNAME@$HOST:$PWD^G^M# '
          ;;

     xterm)
          PS1='^[];$LOGNAME@$HOST:$PWD^G^M# '
          ;;


     vt100|ansi)
          PS1='$IFS$LOGNAME@$HOST:$PWD$IFS# '
          ;;

     *)
          PS1='$IFS$LOGNAME@$HOST:$PWD$IFS# '
          ;;

esac
export PS1

The beforementioned "\h", "\w" etc., are AFAIK specialities of the bash and will not work in ksh.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

edit /etc/profile
add an entry:
PS1="`id -un`@`uname -n`:/$PWD>"
export PS1

your new prompt should look like this if you are logged in as root, your hostname is abcdhost1 and you are in /etc directory:
root@abcdhost1:/etc>