ksh on AIX - pwd in prompt does not update when changing folders

Question

I'm very new to AIX as well as ksh, but I currently have some downtime at work and am trying to configure my prompt to be both colored and show my current location.

At the moment, I get the correct path only once on login, afterwards it continues to show my user directory. Colors work fine. logname and hostname are correct.

PS1="$(echo "\033[35m`logname`\033[34m@\033[35m`hostname` \033[36m`pwd`\033[1;35m\n\>\033[0m") "

Can't show a screenshot, but sample output would look like this in any directory:

userid@hostname /home/look/a/subfolder
>

I tried a bunch of different versions but I either couldn't get it to show anything or all special characters appeared as written in .profile.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Edit: Thanks to Stéphane, ESC+CTRL+V works, it's ksh88. AIX 7.1

Answer 1

Try:

eval "$(print "
  fg_magenta='\033[35m' fg_blue='\033[34m' fg_cyan='\033[36m' 
  nl='\n' bold='\033[1m' sgr0='\033[m'")"

PS1="$fg_magenta$LOGNAME$fg_blue@$fg_magenta$(uname -n) $fg_cyan\$PWD$bold$fg_magenta$nl>$sgr0 "

That is, the things that don't change during a shell session, expand them upon assignment (unless they may contain $, `, \, ! characters, but for $PWD which changes any time you wan to store a literal $PWD into $PS1 for that $PWD to be expanded upon prompt expansion¹

---

^{¹ Beware that if those expansions contain ! characters, they will be expanded to the current history number, so strictly speaking that should be ${PWD//!/!!} (${param//pattern/replacement} is a ksh93 operator though)}

Answer 2

I've always used

PS1=$(hostname):'$PWD
$ '