How can the last command's wall time be put in the Bash prompt?

Question

Is there a way to embed the last command\'s elapsed wall time in a Bash prompt? I\'m hoping for something that would look like this:

[last: 0s][/my/dir]$ sl         


        

Answer 1

If you hadn't set up any of the other answers before you kicked off your long-running job and you just want to know how long the job took, you can do the simple

$ HISTTIMEFORMAT="%s " history 2

and it will reply with something like

  654  1278611022 gvn up
  655  1278611714 HISTTIMEFORMAT="%s " history 2

and you can then just visually subtract the two timestamps (anybody know how to capture the output of the shell builtin history command?)