How do I get long command lines to wrap to the next line?

Question

Something I have noticed in Ubuntu for a long time that has been frustrating to me is when I am typing a command at the command line that gets longer (wider) than the terminal width, instead of wrapping to a new line, it goes back to column 1 on the same line and starts over-writing the beginning of my command line. (It doesn't actually overwrite the actual command, but visually, it is overwriting the text that was displayed).

It's hard to explain without seeing it, but let's say my terminal was 20 characters wide (Mine is more like 120 characters - but for the sake of an example), and I want to echo the English alphabet. What I type is this:

echo abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

But what my terminal looks like before I hit the key is:

pqrstuvwxyzghijklmno

When I hit enter, it echos

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

so I know the command was received properly. It just wrapped my typing after the "o" and started over on the same line.

What I would expect to happen, if I typed this command in on a terminal that was only 20 characters wide would be this:

echo abcdefghijklmno
pqrstuvwxyz

Background: I am using bash as my shell, and I have this line in my ~/.bashrc:

set -o vi

to be able to navigate the command line with VI commands. I am currently using Ubuntu 10.10 server, and connecting to the server with Putty.

In any other environment I have worked in, if I type a long command line, it will add a new line underneath the line I am working on when my command gets longer than the terminal width and when I keep typing I can see my command on 2 different lines. But for as long as I can remember using Ubuntu, my long commands only occupy 1 line.

This also happens when I am going back to previous commands in the history (I hit Esc, then 'K' to go back to previous commands) - when I get to a previous command that was longer than the terminal width, the command line gets mangled and I cannot tell where I am at in the command.

The only work-around I have found to see the entire long command is to hit "Esc-V", which opens up the current command in a VI editor.

I don't think I have anything odd in my .bashrc file. I commented out the "set -o vi" line, and I still had the problem.

I downloaded a fresh copy of Putty and didn't make any changes to the configuration - I just typed in my host name to connect, and I still have the problem, so I don't think it's anything with Putty (unless I need to make some config changes)

Has anyone else had this problem, and can anyone think of how to fix it?

Edit

It was my .bashrc file. I've copied the same profile from machine to machine, and I used special characters in my $PS1 that are somehow throwing it off. I'm now sticking with the standard bash variables for my $PS1.

Thanks to @ændrük for the tip on the .bashrc!

...End Edit...

Just to be sure the issue isn't caused by your .bashrc file, I'd recommend temporarily replacing it with a copy of /etc/skel/.bashrc. Keep in mind that you'll need to reconnect for the changes to take effect, and be sure to keep a backup of your own .bashrc. — ændrük, Feb 01 '11 at 20:53
Which terminal application are you using ? The behavior you are describing is not usual, certainly not a default. — João Pinto, Feb 01 '11 at 21:17
In shells that I've worked in (and in Cisco CLI) you can also type Ctrl-L to redisplay the line you are typing, even if it's offscreen. In your situation, that may still produce the broken output you're talking about, but I'd be curious. — belacqua, Feb 01 '11 at 23:26
Feel free to create an "answer" explaining the solution and mark it as accepted. It can seem a little silly, but having a proper answer helps keep the site organized and might more effectively guide others who have similar problems in the future. — ændrük, Feb 02 '11 at 05:07

score 173 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 07 '23 at 11:22

173

Make sure all non-printable bytes in your PS1 are contained within \[ \]. Otherwise, bash will count them in the length of the prompt. It uses the length of the prompt to determine when to wrap the line.

For example, here bash counts the prompt as 19 columns wide, while the prompt displayed by the terminal is only 10 columns wide (My prompt written in cyan, and > written in default color):

PS1='\e[36mMy prompt\e[0m>'         # bash count: 19, actual: 10

while here it only counts the prompt as 10 columns wide because it ignores the bytes between the special \[ and \] escapes:

PS1='\[\e[36m\]My prompt\[\e[0m\]>' # bash count: 10, actual: 10

For good practice though, use tput to generate the terminal escapes rather than hard coding them:

cyan=$(tput setaf 6) # \e[36m
reset=$(tput sgr0)   # \e[0m
PS1='\[$cyan\]My prompt\[$reset\]>'

For more information see the following resources

bash prompt: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/053

tput: https://linuxcommand.org/lc3_adv_tput.php

edited Dec 07 '23 at 11:22

Amol

103
4

answered Feb 02 '11 at 08:00

geirha

46,101

3

That's a great explanation of the problem that the accepted answer doesn't provide – Jamie Cook Oct 02 '13 at 00:41
In the last line of code PS1='...' : why don't single quotes prevent $cyan and $reset from substitution? – andrybak Nov 15 '15 at 13:52
4

@andrybak, they do prevent $cyan and $reset from being substituted, but PS1 is evaluated every time the prompt is printed. You can see this by trying PS1='$var> ' and then give var various values and see how the prompt change. Then try PS1="$var> " and notice that the prompt remains static; $var got expanded during assignment, not every time PS1 is evaluated. – geirha Nov 16 '15 at 19:52
1

This is amazing. Thanks so much for posting this! It makes escaping the square brackets much easier and more readable. – phyatt Dec 01 '15 at 20:41
How I do make this work PS1=${PS1}"\e]2;$@\a" . I tried PS1=${PS1}"\[\e]2;\]$@\[\a\]" – Ramana Reddy Jul 28 '16 at 10:27
@RamanaReddy Don't set the title from PS1. If you want to change the title everytime the prompt changes, use PROMPT_COMMAND, however since you use $@ in there, it suggests you want to set it on demand, so use a function like this: set_title() { printf '\e]2;%s\a' "$1"; } And to use it: set_title "This is TITLE". – geirha Jul 29 '16 at 10:48
Would give +10 upvotes if I can. Great explanation and finally I got how the thing was parsed. – Everyone Feb 02 '18 at 03:29
Fantastic answer!! I also used .bashrc PS1 Generator to help me solve my problem. Just carefully remove the extra unnecessary \[$(tput sgr0)\] bits that it adds after every part that you add. – Chiramisu Dec 07 '18 at 20:47
This could be better, but I used the following to get a leg up on debugging a complex prompt composed from multiple functions/variables: printf "%q\n" "${PS1//\\/}" – abathur May 17 '19 at 00:47
This doens't seem to work for vi-ins-mode-string and vi-cmd-mode-string... The square brackets are just added to the prompt? – winklerrr Feb 24 '20 at 10:11
Okay, so for the vi string, the beginning escape sequence is \1 and the ending is \2 instead of \[ and \]. Source: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-Init-File-Syntax.html#index-vi_002dcmd_002dmode_002dstring – winklerrr Feb 24 '20 at 10:30
1

@winklerrr the \[ and \] in PS1 actually get translated to \1 and \2 before it's handed to readline, so it's actually the same, just that when you're dealing with readline directly, you need to use its own \1 and \2. – geirha Feb 25 '20 at 07:51
@geirha yeah that was the case because I have those settings in my input.rc – winklerrr Feb 26 '20 at 12:02

score 60 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 29 '17 at 00:52

60

I guess you have configured your PS1 with colors, right?

Just make sure you have \[ inside your PS1 quote preceding your color set

For example:

PS1='\[\e[0;32m\u@\w/:\[\e[m '

edited Oct 29 '17 at 00:52

wjandrea

14,236
4
48
98

answered Feb 02 '11 at 07:06

My PS1 was export PS1='^[[96m'$(hostname)'<^[[92m${PWD}^[[96m>^[[97m ' - I've been using that one for a long time - it's KSH compatible... – BrianH Feb 02 '11 at 16:48
2

Wow. I've been using terminal prompts since forever and never had this problem before. Would have never figured that out. Thanks. – bchurchill Sep 30 '13 at 21:51
3

using \[ while using simple quotes yields an unintended slash. also, there should be used ] in the end of the magical chars, as noted in the best-voted answer – igorsantos07 Jul 03 '14 at 21:32
3

-1 Doesn't work. You need to wrap the non-printing section with \[ at the start and \] at the end. – wjandrea Oct 29 '17 at 00:52
@igorsantos07 The double-backslash in \\[ was a typo caused by an edit. I've fixed it. – wjandrea Oct 29 '17 at 00:53
Doesn't work. The other answer explains the real solution. @BrianH you should select the other answer as the real answer of the question. This one creates more problems than it fixes. – Everyone Feb 02 '18 at 03:30

score 17 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 19 '16 at 20:58

17

I had a similar issue, and finally found a simple solution.

Add following line in your .bashrc file:

COLUMNS=250

Then type source ~/.bashrc to get the desired effect.

edited Feb 19 '16 at 20:58

cat

1,672

answered Apr 17 '12 at 10:58

Deboshree

179
1
2

In some cases, such as narrow terminator subdivisions, the problem is not in the promt color characters but just in a wrong COLUMNS value. This answer took me out of a very bothering hole! – Carles Sala Jan 13 '14 at 13:31
1

Logging off is unnecessary. Do source .bashrc. Your prompt will update immediately – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Aug 17 '15 at 01:24
2

I found that since I didn't have shopt setwinsize set for my bash, so it wasn't updating COLUMNS right, see http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/167911/8337 – rogerdpack Sep 11 '15 at 22:11
1

I did export COLUMNS=250 followed by export TERM=xterm and it was happy. – Philip Kearns Aug 02 '16 at 14:18

score 7 · Answer 4 · edited May 24 '13 at 21:31

7

A simple thing to do would be to add the following line before setting the PS1:

stty columns 1000

For example,

stty columns 1000
PS1='\[\e[0;32m\u@\w/:[\e[m '

however this does affect other unix commands like ls and man.

edited May 24 '13 at 21:31

Community

1

answered Feb 12 '13 at 15:27

Gennady

89

1

That works in OSX. – raskhadafi Jun 26 '14 at 07:12
4

This also affects vim badly. Please don't use this. – justhalf Dec 28 '15 at 07:21
1

this is the only thing that worked for me. – astrojuanlu Dec 12 '20 at 15:42

score 5 · Answer 5 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

5

I had the same issue with a custom coloured prompt, even though I contained colour codes within \[ and \] delimiters. It turns out that bash has problems echoing colours from inside a function. I ended up just using variables for my prompt, and though my .bashrc is a little less elegant, everything works nicely now.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

Community

1

answered May 06 '12 at 04:20

reentim

51

If anyone's still reading this, it is actually possible to escape colors in a function. See this answer on the linked question. – wjandrea Oct 29 '17 at 01:20

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Feb 25 '19 at 09:49

So I just had the same issue with a slight twist on it and I thought I would share my solution too, just to add my little nuance :D

My initial PS1 was

PS1="\[\033[01;32m\]\u\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$"

The problem I had was that I was trying to change my terminal title as well as the command prompt. The way I did this was by adding \[\033]0;\]Title\a to the PS1 variable.

So now my PS1 was:

PS1="\[\033[01;32m\]\u\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$\[\033]0;\]Title\a"

This messed up the line wrapping for me. I finally figured out that bash doesn't seem to like having \a at the end. To circumvent this, I put the title in a variable, which seemed to fix it.

TITLE="\033]0;Title\a"
PS1="\[\033[01;32m\]\u\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$\[$TITLE\]"

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 07 '19 at 18:22

\[ and \] didn't work for me. I guess there was something different about how I was generating the prompt (from an external program), or because my prompt was "dynamic".

After reading this I found that you can actually escape the color codes with the 0x01 and 0x02 bytes.

e.g. I'm using a special version of Chalk and I wrap the colors using this:

const Chalk = require('@nasc/chalk');

const chalk = new Chalk.constructor({
  wrapper: {
    pre: '\1',
    post: '\2',
  }
});

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Apr 07 '17 at 20:39

I had this problem when connected in tmux. The problem was that I had an ipython session in the background (ctrl + z) and that somehow broke line wrapping. As soon as I terminated it (fg, ctrl+d+d) my terminal started working properly

So check for any stopped interactive prompts.

How do I get long command lines to wrap to the next line?

8 Answers8

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