The following should be on one line in .bashrc (or any other shell supporting PS0 I guess): export PS0='\[\033[48;5;46m\]\[\033[38;5;0m\]\D{%Y%m%d}@\t\[\033[00m\]\n' To think of finding this after 27 years of 'nux, on a whim of "that would be a good idea, Bash should have a patch made for auto timestamping of each command just before it runs from the command line, rather than just in the prompt string PS1; oh wait, let's double check man bash und (note the Germanic variant of "and" for the TDS win) see if there's anything related to PS1; oh hallelujah, there's something called PS0, of course, that is the logical way to do this, thank you God's of MUH Bash bros (Muh United Hackers of Bash)" Most likely it was every man and his dog who's ever used a command prompt before, excepting my extraordinarily humble self, who already knew of PS0. Enjoy ;0