Automatically timing every executed command and show in Bash prompt? [duplicate]

Question

I often happen to forget to explicitly prefix executions with the "time" command, ideally I would see in the next shell prompt how much real time the last command took (on every command).

I already scoured through the bash documentation, but couldn't find anything related.

Answer 1

You could do this:

$ bind '"\C-j": "\C-atime \C-m"'

Or put this in your ~/.inputrc:

"\C-j": "\C-atime \C-m"

Then when you want to do time sleep 1 you'd type sleep 1 and press Ctrl+J instead of Enter.

I would not recommend swapping the j and m in the bind command (or in the .inputrc file). Every time you'd press Enter you'd get time added which could be pretty annoying and would cause errors when typing a multi-line command.

You could add this to your ~/.bashrc to make the output of time more compact:

export TIMEFORMAT='r: %R, u: %U, s: %S'

(similar to my answer here.)