short date in bash PS1 prompt

Question

You can use \d in the your PS1 confuration to display a long date ie. Tues 18 May, but how can I get it to display it in a format like 18.05.2012 for example?

Answer 1

Try this:

PS1="\$(date +%d.%m.%Y) > "
export PS1

Answer 2

Try including \D{%d.%m.%Y}. You can use any time format suppoorted by strftime(3).

Answer 3

Use \D{format} where format is a strftime format code. For example:

$ export PS1='\D{%d.%m.%Y}$ '
08.02.2012$

Answer 4

Rather than telling the shell to execute the date command each time, you would rather use the built-in format. Hence you can also use (though a little variation from what you have asked)

\D{%F %T}

to give you date and time. date in format : YYYY-MM-DD and time in format hh:mm:ss.

Answer 5

you can try this that display time:

$ PS1="\n\t \u@\h:\w# "

08:18:57 user@localhost:/home/user#