Customizing the OS X terminal intro and prompt

When you open a new terminal, OS X greets you with “Welcome to Darwin!”. You can change this intro by changing ‘the message of the day’ in /private/etc/motd. If you like to, you can add some fancy ascii art.

You can also change the prompt. In ~/.profile add the following line: PS1="\u@\h:\w ". This prints the username, the hostname and the current working directory. There are other switches you can use.