5. Printing the current job name

Often a user will start a long-lived foreground job such as top, an editor, an email client, etc, and wishes the name of the job to be shown in the title. This is a more thorny problem and is only achieved easily in zsh.

5.1 zsh

zsh provides an ideal builtin function for this purpose:

preexec()   a function which is just before a command is executed
$*,$1,...   arguments passed to preexec()

case $TERM in
    xterm*)
      preexec () {
        print -Pn "\e]0;$*\a"
      }
    ;;
esac

5.2 Other shells

This is not easy in other shells which lack an equivalent of the preexec() function. If anyone has examples please email them to the author.