I want the name of command running , e.g unzip to be visible through the title bar of gnome-terminal , but it seems to be impossible , if the application running doesn't set a title explicitly , even though I choose 'Replace initial title' option in the profile dialog.

0

2 Answers

This is a more complete solution actually taking care of bash-completion spamming garbage.

To be clear: I did nothing on my own here but research. All credit goes to Marius Gedminas.

This works perfectly for me with Gnome-Terminal/Terminator (put it in your .bashrc or somewhere that's getting sourced)

# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*) PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD}\007"' # Show the currently running command in the terminal title: # show_command_in_title_bar() { case "$BASH_COMMAND" in *\033]0*) # The command is trying to set the title bar as well; # this is most likely the execution of $PROMPT_COMMAND. # In any case nested escapes confuse the terminal, so don't # output them. ;; *) echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${BASH_COMMAND}\007" ;; esac } trap show_command_in_title_bar DEBUG ;;
*) ;;
esac

Also this is a cross-post because I just found out about it and wanted to share and I think it's useful here as well.

3

This has been sort of answered here.

• trap 'command' DEBUG makes bash run command before every command.
• echo -ne "\033]0;Title\007" changes the title to "Title"
• $BASH_COMMAND contains the command being run.

Combining these we get

trap 'echo -ne "\033]0;$BASH_COMMAND\007" > /dev/stderr' DEBUG

Then we just have to reset the title after we complete the command. I did this by setting $PS1 to change the title to the current path.

tl;dr: Add these two lines (in this order, otherwise I got a garbled prompt) to the bottom of ~/.bashrc

PS1="\033]0;\w\007${PS1}"
trap 'echo -ne "\033]0;$BASH_COMMAND\007" > /dev/stderr' DEBUG

Edit: Your $PS1 might already change the title, in which case only the last line is needed.

1