Bash - Update terminal title by running a second command

Question

On my terminal in Ubuntu, I often run programs which keep running for a long time. And since there are a lot of these programs, I keep forgetting which terminal is for which

Answer 1

I'm doing something like this, to show my pwd in the title, which could be modified to do whatever you want to do with the title:

function title { echo -en "\033]2;$1\007"; }
function cd { dir=$1; if [ -z "$dir" ]; then dir=~; fi; builtin cd "$dir" && title `pwd`; }

I just threw this in my ~/.bash_aliases.

Update

I ran into strange bugs with my original answer. I ended up picking apart the default Ubuntu PS1 and breaking it into parts only to realize one of the parts was the title:

# simple prompt
COLOR_YELLOW_BOLD="\[\033[1;33m\]"
COLOR_DEFAULT="\[\033[0m\]"
TITLE="\[\e]0;\u@\h:\w\a\]"
PROMPT="\w\n$ "
HUH="${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}"
PS1="${COLOR_YELLOW_BOLD}${TITLE}${HUH}${PROMPT}${COLOR_DEFAULT}"

Without breaking into variables, it would look like this:

PS1="\[\033[1;33m\]\[\e]0;\u@\h:\w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\w\n$ \[\033[0m\]"