I find it useful to have a visual prompt when I am logged into a Linux server as root (something you should rarely do). One way of doing this is by adding colour to your command line prompt. I decided to colour the username green if logged in as a regular user, and red if logged in as root.
It looks like this:
[username@hostname ~]$
and when logged in as root:
[root@hostname ~]#
Here’s how to do it. While logged in as yourself, edit your .bashrc file and change the export PS1 line so it reads like this:
export PS1='[e[0;32m][u[e[m]@h W]$ '
Now su to root, and edit it’s .bashrc file changing export PS1 to this:
export PS1='[[e[0;31m]u[e[m]@h W]$ '
That easy. You can do a lot more things with your command prompt, but this is enough for me. Be careful when using non-printing characters (such as the colour commands above). These should be surrounded by escape block ([ and ]).
