The common default of some variant of \h:\w\$ for a Bash prompt PS1 string includes the \w escape character, so that the user’s current working directory appears in the prompt, but with $HOME shortened to a tilde:

tom@sanctum:~$
tom@sanctum:~/Documents$
tom@sanctum:/usr/local/nagios$

This is normally very helpful, particularly if you leave your shell for a time and forget where you are, though of course you can always call the pwd shell builtin. However it can get annoying for very deep directory hierarchies, particularly if you’re using a smaller terminal window:

tom@sanctum:/chroot/apache/usr/local/perl/app-library/lib/App/Library/Class:~$

If you’re using Bash version 4.0 or above (bash --version), you can save a bit of terminal space by setting the PROMPT_DIRTRIM variable for the shell. This limits the length of the tail end of the \w and \W expansions to that number of path elements:

tom@sanctum:/chroot/apache/usr/local/app-library/lib/App/Library/Class$ PROMPT_DIRTRIM=3
tom@sanctum:.../App/Library/Class$

This is a good thing to include in your ~/.bashrc file if you often find yourself deep in directory trees where the upper end of the hierarchy isn’t of immediate interest to you. You can remove the effect again by unsetting the variable:

tom@sanctum:.../App/Library/Class$ unset PROMPT_DIRTRIM
tom@sanctum:/chroot/apache/usr/local/app-library/lib/App/Library/Class$