Why is my command prompt different

Question

Long story short, I needed to completely reinstall my CentOS/WHM/cPanel stack on a server. I had cPanel account backups available to me (backed up on S3 using the built in WHM backup system), so I used those backups to restore my user accounts on the fresh installation. I again used the built in WHM tools to restore the accounts from S3. The exact restoration process was to use SSH's wget to download from S3 into the /home/ directory, then to use "Restore a Full Account/cpmove File".

Now when I log into a user account with SSH, things look different:

Before:

Before I would see cPanelAccountName@domain.name [~/currentFolder]#

After:

Now I see [cPanelAccountName@serverHostName public_html]$

Everything has moved inside the square brackets, the domain name associated with the account is no longer showing, and the server's host name is now showing. And there's a $ instead of #.

I am afraid that the accounts are not being restored correctly, but I'm hoping that this is just due to a newer version of something in my stack.

So my question is what exactly do these changes signify?

Answer 1

How the command prompt appears is determined by the environment variable PS1. You seem to have had a custom value for this variable and after rebuilding the server, it seems to have gone back to the default one. If you prefer to the see the prompt the way how it was before then you can modify this variable.

Do not have to worry about whether your cPanel accounts have been restored correctly based on this.

Here is the settings on my server:

sree@singa01 [/tmp]$ echo $PS1
\u@\h [\w]$

See how I changed the position of the square brackets in the prompt by changing their position in the PS1 variable:

sree@singa01 [/tmp]$ export PS1="[\u@\h \w]$ "
[sree@singa01 /tmp]$

You can read through the quick tutorials following the below two links and you can modify the prompt as you wish:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

PS1 – Default interaction prompt