HOWTO: populate your term’s title automatically

When you’re running a ton of termial windows or tabs, it helps to have the title of the box name, along with some environment values, easily available to keep you orientated. Here’s a quick script I created to do this automatically when called via your .profile file in your home directory.

#!/bin/bash
HOST_NAME=`hostname -f`
if [ `id -u` = 0 ]; then
OPT="`uname` (`uname -a | cut -f12 -d' ' -`) - ROOT USER"
else
OPT="`uname` (`uname -a | cut -f12 -d' ' -`)"
fi
REPLACE="${HOST_NAME} - ${OPT}"
echo -n -e "\033]0; $REPLACE \007 "
echo "${REPLACE}"
exit 0

When I run this script in my term here at work, the title or tab becomes:

nldg-8 (Linux / x86_64)

Drop this into a bin directory your user can hit – I always put on in my home directory and append ~/bin to my PATH in my .profile. For Solaris fans/users, it needs to be done a bit differently:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
HOST_NAME=`uname -a | cut -f2 -d' ' -`
OPT="(`uname -a | cut -f1 -d' ' -` / `uname -a | cut -f6 -d' '`)"
REPLACE="${HOST_NAME} - ${OPT}"
echo -n -e "\033]0; $REPLACE \007 "
echo "${REPLACE}"
exit 0

foo

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