When working in terminal, I’d like my prompt to look like:


[user@host:.../cocoa/apple/examples]$


I like to know a couple levels above where I am without it taking over the entire screen width. This function will let you show the last 3 levels or the whole path if less. It also shows ~ for your home path. Here is the code to get this to work in your .profile/.bashrc/whatever:

# Prompt that replace console title and uses breadcrumbs
export PS1='\[\e]2;\u@\H \w\a\][\u@\h:`breadcrumbs "$PWD" 3`]\$ '

# Function that returns the last n path components of the specified path after
# replacing $HOME with ~.  Call like:
#     breadcrumbs path n
function breadcrumbs
{
    echo $1 | sed "s|^$HOME|~|" | awk -v n=$2 '{
        # Split the path into components
        count = split($0, components, "/");

        # If there are less than n components, just print the whole path
        if (count <= n) {
            print $0
        } else {
            # Else print the last n components
            if (count > n) {
            	printf ".../"
            }

            for (i = count - n + 1; i < count; i++) {
                printf "%s/", components[i]
            }

            printf "%s", components[i]
        }
    }'
}