you're using bash? if you are go into the bash man page and search (that /) for ps1, here are all the bindings anyway, in your .bash_profile put export PS1="[some escape key sequences and some static chars]"
\a an ASCII bell character (07) \d the date in "Weekday Month Date" format (e.g., "Tue May 26") \e an ASCII escape character (033) \h the hostname up to the first `.' \H the hostname \n newline \s the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following the final slash) \t the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format \T the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format \@ the current time in 12-hour am/pm format \u the username of the current user \v the version of bash (e.g., 2.00) \V the release of bash, version + patchlevel (e.g., 2.00.0) \w the current working directory \W the basename of the current working direc- tory \! the history number of this command \# the command number of this command \$ if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $ \nnn the character corresponding to the octal \\ a backslash \[ begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to embed a terminal so your basic prompt (from dos) is: export ps1"\w$" --dave