When we have entered the chroot'ed environment in the next section we want to export a couple of environment variables in that shell such as PS1, PATH and others variables which are good to have set. For that purpose we'll create the $LFS/root/.bash_profile file which will be read by bash when we enter the chroot environment. Create a new file $LFS/root/.bash_profile by running the following. cat > $LFS/root/.bash_profile << "EOF" # Begin /root/.bash_profile PS1='\u:\w\$ ' PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin export PS1 PATH # End /root/.bash_profile EOF The PS1 variable is an environment variable that controls the appearance of the command prompt. See the bash man page for details how this variable is constructed. Additional environment variables, aliases and so forth that are needed and/or wanted can be added at your own discretion.