Mac OS X Change the Terminal Window Title
The title of the Mac OS X terminal window can easily be changed. Changing the title can be useful when running a script or when using multiple terminal windows for different purposes in order to identify them easily when switching between applications and windows.
In the terminal window, from a bash prompt (the default shell) or in a bash shell script, use the following command to change the terminal window title to Tech-Recipes rules:
echo -n -e "\033]0;Tech-Recipes rules\007"
You can place (just about) any text in place of “Tech-Recipes rules” including the contents of a variable. Consider the following example:
name=`hostname`
echo -n -e "\033]0;$name\007"
This will change the title of the terminal to the hostname of the computer running the shell.
The Conversation
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November 08, 2008 at 8:46 pm, des09 said:
How would you set the tab title when running multiple tabs?
April 27, 2009 at 7:48 am, luca said:
Thanks, works like a charm. However, it doesn’t change the title of a tab, just that of the main windows in which many tabs are contained – so it’s useless to be able to see at a glance which terminal is the one you’re looking for.
November 20, 2009 at 4:33 pm, Anonymous said:
Perfect, I put this in my .bashrc and the title changes on each tab as I login
echo -n -e “33]0;`hostname`07″
The only problem I have is that it doesn’t change back, when I get logged out, so I have an alias to reset it…
alias sett=”echo -n -e “33]0;`hostname`07″
November 20, 2009 at 4:48 pm, Anonymous said:
I put this in my .bashrc
echo -n -e “33]0;`hostname`07
Then on each tab as I log into a different machine (It has to have that line in the .bashrc of the user/machine I’m logging into) it sets the title as I log in to the machine, so all the tabs are correct.
And to recover on logout, I put this in the .bash_logout:
prev=`who am i | sed -e “s/.*((.*))/1/”`
if test ! x$prev = x
then
echo -n -e “33]0;$prev07″
fi
alias sett=”echo -n -e “33]0;`hostname`07″
January 20, 2010 at 10:09 am, Anonymous said:
In bash, you can do this:
PS1=”33]0;H07h:W u$ ”
The PS1 prompt gets printed at every command (see ‘man bash’). Thus, the window title gets set at each display of the prompt — so if you log out of one shell, the prompt from the old shell is displayed and re-sets the window title.
This method also gets you all the bash prompt expansions (see ‘man bash’, search for PROMPTING), like H which expands to the full hostname and h which expands to the hostname up to the first . and so on.
February 09, 2011 at 7:31 pm, Ivan Tumanov said:
This works in an interesting way –
export PS1=”$(echo -n -e “33]0;w07″)w $”
executes the echo command to set the tab title to w and then shows a regular w $ prompt.
November 07, 2011 at 11:57 am, Julie said:
Awesome. Perfect. Thanks!
November 13, 2011 at 5:36 am, Pedro Furlanetto said:
I found this one to be the most convenient:
export PS1=”\$(echo -n -e ’33]0;\W07′)\W \u $ “
November 30, 2011 at 9:47 pm, moonpixel said:
nice, using it like this
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo -n -e “33]0;$107″
exit 0