Change Command Prompt - Variables are literal, and changes to .bashrc or .bash_profile not making a difference Trying to change my command prompt in OS X 10.8 / Mountain Lion. Changes to ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile do not make any difference. Like:

export PS1="\W \$"


It defaults to the host name ("\h\%"). Even if I try to set PS1 in the terminal, it changes but displays the variables literally, as below:

ws10% PS1="\W \$"
\W $


(with ws10 being the host name)

My ~/.bashrc file:

export PS1="\W \$ "


Any ideas? I keep getting lost when I cd up and down the directory structure! Thanks a lot.
Typically on Mac OS X, only .bash_profile is executing when starting a new terminal. A common solution is to source one file into the other, for example in ~/.bashrc:

[ -r ~/.bash_profile ] &amp;&amp; source ~/.bash_profile


Apart from that, your example works perfectly fine for me when put in .bash_profile. If you still experience problems, maybe you are overlooking something else?