hostname and prompt shows only a ?

[gregg_hughes_ISC]

Good morning, all!

I have a CentOS 5.10 virtual machine that has started to display some odd behaviour. The prompt just shows a ? where the hostname would normally be, i.e root@? and not root@testhostname. I checked the /etc/sysconfig/network file and the hostname is shown there. Hostname -s shows the correct machine name.

Any idea on what's happening here?

Thanks!

Gregg

[gerald_clark]

[root@gclark Backup1]# echo $PS1
[\u@\h \W]\$

[Super Jamie]

In case Gerald's answer is a bit obscure, the shell displays a prompt based on the environment variable PS1.

This variable can contain things like \u for username and so on. These would be described in your shell manual.

It's common to set your own prompt in your shell profile, for bash this is ~/.bashrc

Here's mine with a few others I have lying around commented out:

Code: Select all

$ grep PS1 .bashrc
# PS1="[\u@\h \W]\\$ "
# PS1="\[\e[0;31m\][\u@\h \W]\\$\[\e[0m\] "
# PS1="\[\033]0;\u@\h: \w\007\]\[\e[0;32m\]\h\[\e[0;32m\]:\[\e[0;34m\]\w \[\e[0m\]\\$ "
PS1="[\[\e[0;32m\]\u@\h \[\e[0;34m\]\W\[\e[0m\]]\\$ "

You can try these out just by running PS1="whatever"