Are you sick and tired of your Z's bash prompt looking like "bash-2.05$"? 

Well, here's how you fix that: 

First, create yourself two files and chmod them to 775: 

bash-2.05$ touch ~/.bash_profile ~/.bashrc 
bash-2.05$ chmod 775 .bash* 

Bash, by default, is going to look in your home directory (~ means your home dir) for .bash_profile. You could just put everything into this file, but the standard is to have a .bashrc sourced from within your .bash_profile. It should look like this: 

bash-2.05$ cat .bash_profile 
# Get the aliases and functions 
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then 
. ~/.bashrc 
fi 


This is all pretty standard stuff. Now for a basic .bashrc... 

bash-2.05$ cat .bashrc 
#aliases 
alias enki='ssh -l riskable enki.youknowwhat.com' 

#environment variables 
PS1='\[\e[0;32m\]\h\[\e[0;37m\]\[\e (\w)\[\e[0;0m\]$ ' 
ENV=$HOME/.bashrc 
export ENV PS1 

Test it: 

bash-2.05$ bash 
rife(~)$ 


If everything went well, that's what your prompt should look like (with colored text). If you made a mistake, check that you copied everything correctly (including the dots i.e. ". ./.bashrc" 

You now have a working bash environment that has a nice useful colorized prompt and the necessary files to customize everything to your liking.