How do I know if my mac's Terminal has been hacked? I was using Terminal just now and realized that I was seeing something different on the screen than I have in the past. I can't remember what it used to be, but I know for a FACT that I have never seen "integrativeasheville:~" in Terminal. What is going on?

Last login: Thu Aug  7 23:25:09 on ttys000
integrativeasheville:~ pbishop$ pwd
/Users/pbishop
integrativeasheville:~ pbishop$ whoami
pbishop
integrativeasheville:~ pbishop$ hostname
integrativeasheville.us8.list
This:

 integrativeasheville:~


is called the shell prompt. It's presented to you when you open a shell in a Terminal window and it can be customized. Some people like their prompts to show lots of information like the hostname their currently logged in to, the user they're running as, the current directory they're, etc. For example, I like:

/Users/ian/code/packer-config |ruby-2.1.1@vanilla| [git::master]
&gt;


That's a two-line prompt that shows me the directory, the version of Ruby loaded by RVM and the gem bundle as well as the git branch I'm working on and the clean/dirty state of the local repository.

The prompt is completely customizable via PS1 environment variable in bash (the default shell in OS X). Out of the box, OS X has PS1 set to:

PS1="\h:\W \u\$"


This says: "display the host name, followed by a colon, then the current working directory followed by a space and then the name of the user and the default prompt character."

For a standard user this evaluates to something like:

&gt; bash
bash-3.2$ PS1="\h:\W \u\$"
ianchesalsimac:~ ian$


As you can see, my prompt looks an awful lot like your prompt when I use bash (I use zsh by default in my environment so I had to switch to bash to show this to you).

That is to say, in a very long winded way: your prompt looks exactly like the default OS X bash prompt. Nothing odd about it all.

The integrativeasheville part is your machine's host name. the : is just a separator. And the ~ means you're in your home directory -- ~ is shorthand for "my home directory" in shell path language.