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

Will putting a \t in PS1 work for you?

It does not give the elapsed time but it should be easy enough to subtract the times when necessary.

$ export PS1='[\t] [\w]\$ '
[14:22:30] [/bin]$ sleep 10
[14:22:42] [/bin]$

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Following the OP's comment that he is already using \t. If you can use tcsh instead of bash, you can set the time variable.

/bin 1 > set time = 0
/bin 2 > sleep 10
0.015u 0.046s 0:10.09 0.4%      0+0k 0+0io 2570pf+0w
/bin 3 >

You can change the format of the printing to be less ugly (se the tcsh man page).

/bin 4 > set time = ( 0 "last: %E" )
/bin 5 > sleep 10
last: 0:10.09
/bin 6 >

I do not know of a similar facility in bash