Customizing the Prompt

The following variables are available for customizing the appearance of the command-line prompts. Octave allows the prompt to be customized by inserting a number of backslash-escaped special characters that are decoded as follows:

\t

The time.

\d

The date.

\n

Begins a new line by printing the equivalent of a carriage return followed by a line feed.

\s

The name of the program (usually just octave).

\w

The current working directory.

\W

The basename of the current working directory.

\u

The username of the current user.

\h

The hostname up to the first `.'.

\H

The hostname.

\#

The command number of this command counting from when Octave starts.

\!

The history number of this command. This differs from \# by the number of commands in the history list when Octave starts.

\$

If the effective UID is 0 a #, otherwise a $.

\nnn

The character whose character code in octal is nnn.

\\

A backslash.

PS1	Built-in Variable

The primary prompt string. When executing interactively Octave displays the primary prompt PS1 when it is ready to read a command. The default value of PS1 is "\s:\#> ". To change it use a command like octave:13> PS1 = "\\u@\\H> " which will result in the prompt boris@kremvax> for the user boris logged in on the host kremvax.kgb.su. Note that two backslashes are required to enter a backslash into a string. See Strings.

PS2	Built-in Variable

The secondary prompt string which is printed when Octave is expecting additional input to complete a command. For example when defining a function over several lines Octave will print the value of PS1 at the beginning of each line after the first. The default value of PS2 is "> ".

PS4	Built-in Variable

If Octave is invoked with the --echo-commands option the value of PS4 is printed before each line of input that is echoed. The default value of PS4 is "+ ". See Invoking Octave for a description of --echo-commands.