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On my Fedora 19 system, I am able to change the system hostname with hostnamectl. This allows me to set several things, such as the static (normal) hostname, as well as a "pretty" hostname.
Is there a simple command that retrieves the pretty hostname, from a bash prompt?
hostname returns the static hostname, and the man page shows no options to recover the pretty one.
As per man hostnamectl:
The static host name is stored in /etc/hostname, see hostname(5) for more information. The pretty host name, chassis type and icon name are stored in /etc/machine-info, see machine-id(5).
Therefore, if you have set a pretty hostname using the command
hostnamectl set-hostname --pretty YourHostname
you can retrieve it using a tool like awk:
awk -F= '/PRETTY/ {print $2}' /etc/machine-info
awk -F= '/PRETTY/ {gsub(/"/,"");print $2}' /etc/os-release is simpler...
Aug 28, 2015 at 9:43
hostnamectl set-hostname --pretty '"MyPretty\\Name"', awk -F= '/PRETTY/ {gsub(/"/,"");print $2}' /etc/machine-info. The result is wrong.
Aug 28, 2015 at 10:14
'"MyPretty\\Name"' as a pretty name?
Aug 28, 2015 at 10:16
sudo hostnamectl --pretty set-hostname "Lennart's Laptop" (example from the manpage) on Fedora 19. awk -F= '/PRETTY/ {gsub(/"/,"");print $2}' prints wrong result Lennart\'s Laptop.
Aug 28, 2015 at 10:26
hostnamectl --pretty will directly print the pretty hostname out. Tested on systemd version 239.
For my system, hostnamectl --static was the ticket. It is worth first running hostnamectl to see how your system is set up. From there, you can determine what steps make the most sense to make it pretty.
