I am looking for an easy solution to monitor in my prompt whether PWD has write permissions or not. I use something like this:   my_variable="${$([[ -w $PWD ]] || echo 0):+my_value}" This sets $my_variable to my_value when there are no write permissions. Although this works, it looks very complicated, especially with the echo command. And I am wondering if there is a more elegant solution. Does anybody have an idea?