Terminal problem-weird appearance before name

Question

When I open Terminal "n014h151" appears before my name
I never seen tihs before, usually its just Andrew$ or something simular.
I've been trying to use this comand sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash to empty my trash as i have a file in there about 78GB its my iphoto library and its taking forever to delete. i'm not having much luck. I'm wondering if something is wrong with my computer to have that weird combination of letters and numbers show up before the name.
Any suggestions and ideas would be apprecated

Answer 1

The default prompt is
hostname:current_working_directory username$
where typically what you initially see for current_working_directory is a tilda ~ which is Unix shorthand for your home directory.
The thing that confuses most home users is that the bash shell takes the current IP address, does a reverse DNS lookup to get the name associated with that address, and plugs that into the hostname field of the prompt.
This gives the expected results when there is no outside your Mac DNS name associated with your IP address, as the Mac DNS lookup code will then substitute the System Preferences -> Sharing -> Computer name.
However, every once in a while, the reverse DNS lookup returns a value, and you get some very strange results for hostname.
While confusing, sometimes annoying, it is harmless.
With respect to deleteng files from the trash, if you have a lot of file it can take awhile to delete each file.  If the space used by those files is a lot (and 78GB is a lot) AND you specified "Secure Erase" it can take a very long time to erase the contents of each file, before freeing the storage.
But having your hostname say n014h151 is harmless.
If you do not use Terminal all that much, just ignore it.  If you use Terminal enough that this kind of uncertanty bothers you, then you can tell 'bash' to use the prompt you want.
Try creating, or modify .bash_profile and adding:
PS1='$(networksetup -getcomputername):\W \u\$ '
NOTE;  the bash shell uses just one of the following, looking for them in the following order
.bash_profile
.bash_login
.profile
If and only if one of these files exist.  You would choose to put the PS1 promot into the one that exists, or create a .bash_profile if non-of them exist.