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General Computing

There may be a few reasons for this. First, make sure your shell is set to Bash. If your shell is not set to Bash, contact our consultants so that they can reset it for you.
If your shell is set to Bash, double-check that you haven't changed, overwritten, or aliased anything important either your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile. E.g., unsetting your PATH, aliasing ., and so on will corrupt your environment and prevent you from interacting with HPC normally.

When you log into HPC, the variable $COMMAND_PROMPT is set to display your current cluster (e.g. (puma)). Sometimes this can cause formatting problems. If you'd prefer to modify your $PS1 (command prompt variable) instead, you can add the following to your ~/.bashrc: 

if [ -n "${PROMPT_COMMAND}" -a -r /usr/local/bin/slurm-selector.sh ]; then
  SavePS1=${PS1}
  Cur_Cluster=$(eval ${PROMPT_COMMAND} 2>/dev/null)
  PS1="${Cur_Cluster}${SavePS1}"
  unset PROMPT_COMMAND
  for c in puma ocelote elgato; do
    alias ${c}="PS1=\"(${c}) ${SavePS1}\"; . /usr/local/bin/slurm-selector.sh ${c}; unset PROMPT_COMMAND"
  done
  unset Cur_Cluster SavePS1
fi

Files that start with a dot, i.e. a ., are hidden when executing ls without additional options. If you use ls -la, that will show you all the files that exist, both standard and hidden. Dot files are generally important configuration files so it's important to be careful with their contents and deleting them.
Your bashrc is a specific dot file that lives in your home directory (~ is just shorthand for your home) and defines your environment every time you log in. Any commands you add to that file will be run whenever you access the system. This means, if you have common aliases you like to use, paths you like exported in your environment, etc., these can be added to your bashrc to avoid the headache of having to define them in every session.
For more information on working with hidden files, see our Linux cheat sheet page.