Like many other shells, XSH2 provides means for customizing the format of its interactive shell prompt. The prompt is displayed according to the content of the variable $PROMPT on which the following substitutions and interpolations are performed (in this order):

1. Prompt-string replacements

%% - percent sign
%p - XPath location of the current node
%P - like %p but without an initial document variable
%l - XPath location of the current node with ID-shortcuts
%L - like %l but without an initial document variable
%n - name of the current node
%N - local name of the current node
%c - canonical XPath name of the current node
%y - type of the current node (element,attribute,...)
%i - ID of the current node
%d - current document variable
%h - the hostname up to the first '.'
%H - the hostname
%s - XSH shell name (basename of $0)
%t - the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
%T - the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
%@ - the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
%A - the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
%u - the username of the current user
%v - the version of XSH2 (e.g., 2.1.0)
%V - the revision number of XML::XSH2::Functions (e.g. 2.40)
%w - current working directory (on the local filesystem)
%W - basename of %w

2. Variable, XPath and Perl interpolations

Substrings of the forms ${variable}, ${{...perl...}} and ${(...xpath...)} are interpolated as in XSH2 expressions.

3. Special character substitution

\n - newline character
\r - line-feed character
\t - tab character
\a - bell character
\b - backspace character
\f - form feed character
\e - escape character (\033)
\\ - backslash character
\nnn - the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
(useful for non-printable terminal control characters)

The default value of $PROMPT is "%p>".

Note that you must escape ${...} interpolators like \${...} if you want them to be evaluated at each prompt rather than at the time of the assignment to $PROMPT. For example:

$PROMPT="[${{ chomp($u=`uname`);$u }} \${{ chomp($d=`date`);$d }}] %p>"