I took this as puzzle and want to show the result of my puzzling:
First I fiddled with time measurement. The date +%s.%N (which I didn't realize before) was where I started from. Unfortunately, it seems that bashs arithmetic evaluation seems not to support floating points. Thus, I chosed something else:
$ START=$(date +%s.%N)
$ awk 'BEGIN { printf("%fs", '$(date +%s.%N)' - '$START') }' /dev/null
8.059526s
$
This is sufficient to compute the time difference.
Next, I confirmed what you already described: sub-shell invocation prevents usage of shell variables. Thus, I thought about where else I could store the start time which is global for sub-shells but local enough to be used in multiple interactive shells concurrently. My solution are temp. files (in /tmp). To provide a unique name I came up with this pattern: /tmp/$USER.START.$BASHPID.
$ date +%s.%N >/tmp/$USER.START.$BASHPID ; \
> awk 'BEGIN { printf("%fs", '$(date +%s.%N)' - '$(cat /tmp/$USER.START.$BASHPID)') }' /dev/null
cat: /tmp/ds32737.START.11756: No such file or directory
awk: cmd. line:1: BEGIN { printf("%fs", 1491297723.111219300 - ) }
awk: cmd. line:1: ^ syntax error
$
Damn! Again I'm trapped in the sub-shell issue. To come around this, I defined another variable:
$ INTERACTIVE_BASHPID=$BASHPID
$ date +%s.%N >/tmp/$USER.START.$INTERACTIVE_BASHPID ; \
> awk 'BEGIN { printf("%fs", '$(date +%s.%N)' - '$(cat /tmp/$USER.START.$INTERACTIVE_BASHPID)') }' /dev/null
0.075319s
$
Next step: fiddle this together with PS0 and PS1. In a similar puzzle (SO: How to change bash prompt color based on exit code of last command?), I already mastered the "quoting hell". Thus, I should be able to do it again:
$ PS0='$(date +%s.%N >"/tmp/${USER}.START.${INTERACTIVE_BASHPID}")'
$ PS1='$(awk "BEGIN { printf(\"%fs\", "$(date +%s.%N)" - "$(cat /tmp/$USER.START.$INTERACTIVE_BASHPID)") }" /dev/null)'"$PS1"
0.118550s
$
Ahh. It starts to work. Thus, there is only one issue - to find the right start-up script for the initialization of INTERACTIVE_BASHPID. I found ~/.bashrc which seems to be the right one for this, and which I already used in the past for some other personal customizations.
So, putting it all together - these are the lines I added to my ~/.bashrc:
# command duration puzzle
INTERACTIVE_BASHPID=$BASHPID
date +%s.%N >"/tmp/${USER}.START.${INTERACTIVE_BASHPID}"
PS0='$(date +%s.%N >"/tmp/${USER}.START.${INTERACTIVE_BASHPID}")'
PS1='$(awk "BEGIN { printf(\"%fs\", "$(date +%s.%N)" - "$(cat /tmp/$USER.START.$INTERACTIVE_BASHPID)") }" /dev/null)'"$PS1"
The 3rd line (the date command) has been added to solve another issue. Comment it out and start a new interactive bash to find out why.
A snapshot of my cygwin xterm with bash where I added the above lines to ./~bashrc:
Notes:
I consider this rather as solution to a puzzle than a "serious productive" solution. I'm sure that this kind of time measurement consumes itself a lot of time. The time command might provide a better solution: SE: How to get execution time of a script effectively?. However, this was a nice lecture for practicing the bash...
Don't forget that this code pollutes your /tmp directory with a growing number of small files. Either clean-up the /tmp from time to time or add the appropriate commands for clean-up (e.g. to ~/.bash_logout).
