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]$ sleep 10
[last: 10s][/my/dir]$
Background
I often run long data-crunching jobs and it’s useful to know how long they’ve taken so I can estimate how long it will take for future jobs. For very regular tasks, I go ahead and record this information rigorously using appropriate logging techniques. For less-formal tasks, I’ll just prepend the command with time.
It would be nice to automatically time every single interactive command and have the timing information printed in a few characters rather than 3 lines.
You could utilize this zsh-borrowed hook for bash: http://www.twistedmatrix.com/users/glyph/preexec.bash.txt
Timing done with this hook (Mac OS X): Use Growl to monitor long-running shell commands