Here are two variations of the standard ksh shell prompt that I myself find useful on several of my devices, in particular the portables. The first prompt shows the temperature on cpu0, the second the amount of battery claimed to remain:
export PS1='`( /sbin/sysctl hw.sensors.cpu0.temp0 | sed -e \ "s/^.*\([0-9][0-9]\.[0-9]\)\([0-9]\).*$/\1/g;")`$ ' 66.0$ export PS1='`/usr/sbin/apm -l`% $ ' 96% $ Here is a test using date: export PS1='`/bin/date +"%H:%M:%S"`$ ' 14:20:33$ apm is to cool running mode in rc.local Regards -Lars