Command Prompt on Windows XP.

A command prompt (or just prompt) is a character or string of characters used in a command line interface to indicate that the computer is ready to accept typed input. Command prompts usually end with characters such as $, #, : or > and often include other information, such as the path of the current working directory. Image File history File links Windows_Command_Prompt. ... Image File history File links Windows_Command_Prompt. ... Windows XP is a major revision of the Microsoft Windows operating system created for use on desktop and business computer systems. ... In computer programming and some branches of mathematics, strings are sequences of various simple objects. ... Screenshot of a sample Bash session, taken on Gentoo Linux. ... For computer operating systems that support a hierarchial file system, the working directory is the directory path that a user or program has designated to be the directory for files referenced by name only, or by a relative path (as contrasted with using both a files name and a...

It is common to allow prompts to be modifiable by the user. In the proper environment, they may include colors, special characters, and other things like the current time, in order, for instance, to make the prompt more informative or visually pleasing or to easily distinguish sessions on to different machines.

In MS-DOS and in the Windows command line interpreter the prompt is modifiable by issuing a prompt command or by changing the value of the %PROMPT% environment variable. The default C:> style is obtained, for instance, with "prompt $P$G". Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... A command line interpreter is a computer program which reads lines of text that the user types and interprets them in the context of a given operating system or programming language. ... Environment variables are a set of dynamic values that can affect the way running processes will behave. ...

On Unix systems, the $PS1 variable can be used, although other variables also may have an impact on what appears on the screen (depending on what shell is being used). In the bash shell, a prompt of the form Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to Unix Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... A Unix shell, also called the command line, provides the traditional user interface for the Unix operating system. ... UNIX Bash is the shell, or command language interpreter, that will appear in the GNU operating system. ...

[time] user@host: work_dir $

could be set by issuing the command

export PS1='[t] u@H: $(pwd) $'.