How to view process name in terminal-emulator tab or title bar

Question

How can I put the current running process name into a GNOME Terminal tab title (or title bar when there's only one tab)?

Although https://superuser.com/questions/42362/gnome-terminal-process-name-in-tab-title provides a solution (below), it completely clutters each tab with garbage when it starts so as to appear broken. Is there a better way?

case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
    set -o functrace
    trap 'echo -ne "\e]0;$BASH_COMMAND\007"' DEBUG
    PS1="\e]0;\s\007$PS1"
    ;;
*)
    ;;
esac

Answer 1

Well, since everyone already seems to know David Pashley's solution I'm kind of surprised it took me so long to find this one. It actually takes care of the bash-completion problem.

To be clear: I did nothing on my own here but research. All credit goes to Marius Gedminas (http://mg.pov.lt/blog/bash-prompt.html).

This works perfectly for me with Gnome-Terminal/Terminator

# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
    PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD}\007"'

    # Show the currently running command in the terminal title:
    # http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/xterm-titles-with-bash.html
    show_command_in_title_bar()
    {
        case "$BASH_COMMAND" in
            *\033]0*)
                # The command is trying to set the title bar as well;
                # this is most likely the execution of $PROMPT_COMMAND.
                # In any case nested escapes confuse the terminal, so don't
                # output them.
                ;;
            *)
                echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${BASH_COMMAND}\007"
                ;;
        esac
    }
    trap show_command_in_title_bar DEBUG
    ;;
*)
    ;;
esac