If you don't currently follow the Command line Kung Fu blog, I highly suggest you do! Originally started back in February this year by Paul Asadoorian (of PaulDotCom), Ed Skoudis and Hal Pomeranz, each week they publish solutions to challenges posed to each other, using only the command line utilities included on a default installation of Windows, Linux and Mac OS - many of the published solutions contain really useful snippets of code to include in your own scripts.

Something that was covered in Episodes #28, #49 and #52 was customising the command prompt in various ways. On my own Windows systems I now include the following command prompt customisation by default:

Why? The biggest benefit is knowing when commands were started, and when they completed. Many tools don't provide feedback with time and dates, and so by the nature of the date and time being printed on screen each time a prompt is provided, you get a quick and dirty way to see how long a command took to execute.

Setting the prompt temporarily can be done with the 'prompt' command (or 'set prompt'), while making the change permanently can be done by adding an entry to the registry - both can be seen below.

In addition, my prompt also displays how many paths are on the pushd and popd stack, as also seen above.