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

This is minimal stand-alone code to achieve what you want:

function timer_start {
  timer=${timer:-$SECONDS}
}

function timer_stop {
  timer_show=$(($SECONDS - $timer))
  unset timer
}

trap 'timer_start' DEBUG
PROMPT_COMMAND=timer_stop

PS1='[last: ${timer_show}s][\w]$ '

Using your replies and some other threads, I wrote this prompt which I want to share with you. I took a screenshot in wich you can see :

• White : Last return code
• Green and tick mark means success (return code was 0)
• Red and cross mark means error (return code was >0)
• (Green or Red) : Last command execution time in parenthesis
• (Green or Red) : Current date time (\t)
• (Green if not root, Red if root) : the logged username
• (Green) : the server name
• (Blue) : the pwd directory and the usual $

Here is the code to put in your ~/.bashrc file :

function timer_now {
    date +%s%N
}

function timer_start {
    timer_start=${timer_start:-$(timer_now)}
}

function timer_stop {
    local delta_us=$((($(timer_now) - $timer_start) / 1000))
    local us=$((delta_us % 1000))
    local ms=$(((delta_us / 1000) % 1000))
    local s=$(((delta_us / 1000000) % 60))
    local m=$(((delta_us / 60000000) % 60))
    local h=$((delta_us / 3600000000))
    # Goal: always show around 3 digits of accuracy
    if ((h > 0)); then timer_show=${h}h${m}m
    elif ((m > 0)); then timer_show=${m}m${s}s
    elif ((s >= 10)); then timer_show=${s}.$((ms / 100))s
    elif ((s > 0)); then timer_show=${s}.$(printf %03d $ms)s
    elif ((ms >= 100)); then timer_show=${ms}ms
    elif ((ms > 0)); then timer_show=${ms}.$((us / 100))ms
    else timer_show=${us}us
    fi
    unset timer_start
}


set_prompt () {
    Last_Command=$? # Must come first!
    Blue='\[\e[01;34m\]'
    White='\[\e[01;37m\]'
    Red='\[\e[01;31m\]'
    Green='\[\e[01;32m\]'
    Reset='\[\e[00m\]'
    FancyX='\342\234\227'
    Checkmark='\342\234\223'


    # Add a bright white exit status for the last command
    PS1="$White\$? "
    # If it was successful, print a green check mark. Otherwise, print
    # a red X.
    if [[ $Last_Command == 0 ]]; then
        PS1+="$Green$Checkmark "
    else
        PS1+="$Red$FancyX "
    fi

    # Add the ellapsed time and current date
    timer_stop
    PS1+="($timer_show) \t "

    # If root, just print the host in red. Otherwise, print the current user
    # and host in green.
    if [[ $EUID == 0 ]]; then
        PS1+="$Red\\u$Green@\\h "
    else
        PS1+="$Green\\u@\\h "
    fi
    # Print the working directory and prompt marker in blue, and reset
    # the text color to the default.
    PS1+="$Blue\\w \\\$$Reset "
}

trap 'timer_start' DEBUG
PROMPT_COMMAND='set_prompt'

Another very minimal approach is:

trap 'SECONDS=0' DEBUG
export PS1='your_normal_prompt_here ($SECONDS) # '

This shows the number of seconds since the last simple command was started. The counter is not reset if you simply hit Enter without entering a command -- which can be handy when you just want to see how long the terminal has been up since you last did anything in it. It works fine for me in Red Hat and Ubuntu. It did NOT work for me under Cygwin, but I'm not sure if that's a bug or just a limitation of trying to run Bash under Windows.

One possible drawback to this approach is that you keep resetting SECONDS, but if you truly need to preserve SECONDS as the number of seconds since initial shell invocation, you can create your own variable for the PS1 counter instead of using SECONDS directly. Another possible drawback is that a large seconds value such as "999999" might be be better displayed as days+hours+minutes+seconds, but it's easy to add a simple filter such as:

seconds2days() { # convert integer seconds to Ddays,HH:MM:SS
  printf "%ddays,%02d:%02d:%02d" $(((($1/60)/60)/24)) \
  $(((($1/60)/60)%24)) $((($1/60)%60)) $(($1%60)) |
  sed 's/^1days/1day/;s/^0days,\(00:\)*//;s/^0//' ; }
trap 'SECONDS=0' DEBUG
PS1='other_prompt_stuff_here ($(seconds2days $SECONDS)) # '

This translates "999999" into "11days,13:46:39". The sed at the end changes "1days" to "1day", and trims off empty leading values such as "0days,00:". Adjust to taste.