sandra_henrystocker
Unix Dweeb

Putting Text in Window Title Bars

Analysis
Oct 6, 20092 mins

How you go about adding a label to a terminal window’s title bar depends on your shell. Let’s look at how this would work on both Solaris and Linux systems when you’re using bash or ksh.

The first thing you need to do, of course, is identify the information that you want to have displayed in the title bar. If you want the same type of information displayed from system to system, you can set this up in your dot files, picking the identifying information from the environment.

Let’s say you want the system name, plus some information about the operating system and its version to be displayed. You could snag this information from the output of the uname command like so:

TBAR=”`uname -n` – `uname -a | cut -d’ ‘ -f1,3`”

Here, we have used the uname -n command to get the hostname and plucked two pieces of text (OS and version) from the output of the uname -a command, adding a hyphen after the hostname. The $TBAR variable thus has this kind of information in it:

boson - SunOS 5.10

Now, all you have to do is stuff this information into the title bar. You can do that with this odd-looking command:

echo -ne "
sandra_henrystocker

Sandra Henry-Stocker was a programmer, Linux systems administrator, security engineer and Linux journalist for most of her 30-year career. She describes herself as "USL" (Unix as a second language) but remembers enough English to write books and buy groceries. She lives in the mountains in Virginia where, when not working with or writing about Unix, she's chasing the bears away from her bird feeders. Tune into her 2-Minute Linux video tutorials and take command of your command line.

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