re title for xterm in a prior article naoumov physics unc edu sergei naoumov writes hey guys i work on many stations and would like this name and current logname to be in a title of xterm when it s open and a machine name only when it s closed in other words i want host and logname to appear as a title of opened xterm and host when xterm is closed how can i do it apologies if i m answering something already answered in the faq our news feed has been losing a lot of articles lately so i haven t seen the faq lately to check two ways when you start the xterm you can use command line options n icon name to set the icon label t window title to set the window title title window title equivalent to t window title you can use escape sequences to change things on the fly the basic escape sequence is esc p some arbitary text bel where esc and bel are the ascii escape and bell characters p is an ascii decimal digit or depending on whether you are trying to set the window or icon title or both and some arbitary text is your desired label string hence this command will set the window icon title echo your title goes here c to set just the icon title echo your title goes here c to set just the window title echo your title goes here c of course you may have to fiddle with exact syntax depending on how the echo command works on your system and what shell you are using i ve shown system v semantics under bourne or korn shells hint for sun os users use usr bin echo instead of bin echo or csh s built in echo otherwise you ll have to embed literal esc and bel characters in the string instead of using convenient octal sequences if you want your titlebar updated continously say to show your current directory hostname or somesuch then you ll have to see if you can coerce your shell into spitting out the appropriate escape sequences when it prompts for commands sometimes you can just put the appropriate escape sequence in the prompt string itself sometimes not mark lanzo kd qlz lanzo tekelec com xx
