Change background color in linux/unix terminal xterm

 Useful link for modifying the background color.
Especially useful when working with multiple terminal, on different machines ...


http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/16120/in-bash-how-can-i-change-the-color-of-my-command-prompt

Put in your ~/.bashrc

# Color mapping
grey='\[\033[1;30m\]'
red='\[\033[0;31m\]'
RED='\[\033[1;31m\]'
green='\[\033[0;32m\]'
GREEN='\[\033[1;32m\]'
yellow='\[\033[0;33m\]'
YELLOW='\[\033[1;33m\]'
purple='\[\033[0;35m\]'
PURPLE='\[\033[1;35m\]'
white='\[\033[0;37m\]'
WHITE='\[\033[1;37m\]'
blue='\[\033[0;34m\]'
BLUE='\[\033[1;34m\]'
cyan='\[\033[0;36m\]'
CYAN='\[\033[1;36m\]'
NC='\[\033[0m\]'

Step 2. Re-define your PS1 variable:

PS1="$yellow[$CYAN\t$yellow][$red\H$yellow][$GREEN\w$grey$yellow]$NC# "

 or more details also can be found here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Color_Bash_Prompt

Prompt escapes

The various Bash prompt escapes listed in the manpage:
Bash allows these prompt strings to be customized by inserting a number of backslash-escaped special characters that are decoded as follows: \a an ASCII bell character (07) \d the date in "Weekday Month Date" format (e.g., "Tue May 26") \D{format} the format is passed to strftime(3) and the result is inserted into the prompt string an empty format results in a locale-specific time representation. The braces are required \e an ASCII escape character (033) \h the hostname up to the first `.' \H the hostname \j the number of jobs currently managed by the shell \l the basename of the shell's terminal device name \n newline \r carriage return \s the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following the final slash) \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 bash (e.g., 2.00) \V the release of bash, version + patch level (e.g., 2.00.0) \w the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde \W the basename of the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde \! the history number of this command \# the command number of this command \$ if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $ \nnn the character corresponding to the octal number nnn \\ a backslash \[ begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt \] end a sequence of non-printing characters