Set screen-title from shellscript

Question

Is it possible to set the Screen Title using a shell script?

I thought about something like sending the key commands ctrl+A shift-

Answer 1

You can also call screen and tell it to set a title:

screen -X title "new title"

If you're in a screen window, it will set that window's name. If you're not in screen, it will set the most recently opened window's name.

Answer 2

My solution to this problem was to create a bash script and add it to my ~/.bashrc file:

set-title() {
  ORIG==$PS1
  TITLE="\e];$@\a"
  PS1=${ORIG}${TITLE}
}

Now when I'm in any bash shell session, I type "set-title desired_title" and it changes to "desired title". This works for multiple versions of Ubuntu, currently on Kinetic 16.04

I got this solution from here. I was looking for it again, couldn't find it and thought I'd post it here for anyone interested.

Answer 3

To add to Espo's answer, the xterm escape sequences can also be applied to the Bash PS1 variable

ESC]0;stringBEL -- Set icon name and window title to string
ESC]1;stringBEL -- Set icon name to string
ESC]2;stringBEL -- Set window title to string

Example

PS1='\e]0;string\a'

Answer 4

From http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Xterm-Title.html#s3

xterm escape sequences

Window and icon titles may be changed in a running xterm by using XTerm escape sequences. The following sequences are useful in this respect:

• ESC]0;stringBEL -- Set icon name and window title to string
• ESC]1;stringBEL -- Set icon name to string
• ESC]2;stringBEL -- Set window title to string

where ESC is the escape character (\033), and BEL is the bell character (\007).

Printing one of these sequences within the xterm will cause the window or icon title to be changed.

Note: these sequences apply to most xterm derivatives, such as nxterm, color-xterm and rxvt. Other terminal types often use different escapes; see the appendix for examples. For the full list of xterm escape sequences see the file ctlseq2.txt, which comes with the xterm distribution, or xterm.seq, which comes with the rxvt distribution.

Printing the escape sequences

For information that is constant throughout the lifetime of this shell, such as host and username, it will suffice to simply echo the escape string in the shell rc file:

    echo -n "\033]0;${USER}@${HOST}\007"

should produce a title like username@hostname, assuming the shell variables $USER and $HOST are set correctly. The required options for echo may vary by shell (see examples below).

For information that may change during the shell's lifetime, such as current working directory, these escapes really need to be applied every time the prompt changes. This way the string is updated with every command you issue and can keep track of information such as current working directory, username, hostname, etc. Some shells provide special functions for this purpose, some don't and we have to insert the title sequences directly into the prompt string. This is illustrated in the next section.

Answer 5

The following are other ways to script the renaming of screen titles:

Adding the following settings to .ssh/config sets the screen title automatically upon logging in to a system using SSH:

Host *
  PermitLocalCommand yes
  LocalCommand [ "$TERM" == 'screen' ] && echo -ne "\033k%h\033\\" 

Instead of %h, which represents the hostname of the machine you are connecting with, you may use %n, which is the actual name / alias you used to connect to the machine.

NOTE: You need OpenSSH >= v5.1 to be able to use the Localhost %n and %h parameters. Check out 'man ssh_config' for more info on LocalCommand.

To automatically revert the title, back to that of the hostname of the localhost, after closing the SSH session, you can add an escape sequence to you prompt variable PS1 in .bashrc :

export PS1='you_favorite_PS1_here'
if [ "$TERM" == 'screen' ]; then
    export PS1=${PS1}'\[\033k\h\033\\\]'
fi

These tricks are especially useful when using a .screenrc config that shows you in what screen 'tab' you are currently working. Add something like the following to .screenrc to get this working:

caption always "%{= kY}%-w%{= Yk}%n %t%{-}%+w%{ kG} %-= @%H - %LD %d %LM - %c"

Answer 6

 # add the following in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile
 PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\033]0;%s@%s:%s\007" "${USER}" "${HOSTNAME%%.*}" "${PWD/#$HOME/~}"'

or even better copy the whole concept for customizing your bash configs between a lot of hosts from here