All these neat tricks being discussed, and meanwhile I just `date; my_cmd; date` for jobs I want start/end times of. The fact that I can do it with no configuration on all the umpteen boxes I log into is the reason I stick with it.
Whenever I want a command dated like in your suggestion, instead of pressing Enter to execute the command, I press the key-sequence ".,d" and the command gets wrapped in 'date' calls.
All of those are only useful if you thought of it beforehand. Which is rare in my experience, often I want to know the time exactly when something unexpected happened.
