formatting the time in tcsh prompt

[Chad Perrin]

This might be slightly off-topic, I suppose -- but since (t)csh is the
default shell for FreeBSD, I figured this might be a good place to ask.

I'm aware of the %T option for showing 24-hour time in my tcsh prompt,
but it doesn't do exactly what I would like.  Inserting a call to the
date command so I can have the exact formatting I want appears to fail by
only calculating the time once, and showing the same time every time the
prompt appears -- which means that, several hours later, I'm still
looking at the time from when the shell instance was started.

The prompt setting using the date command that I used is as follows:

  set prompt = "[`date +'%H%M'`] %~%# "

At nine in the morning, that gives me:

  [0900] ~>

. . . whereas the tcsh native time formatting for 24-hour time is:

  set prompt = "[%T] %~%# "

At nine in the morning, that gives me:

  [9:00] ~>

I would prefer to not have the colon in there, but it's not a big deal.
The biggest annoyance is the fact that the length of the time string
changes depending on whether it's an AM time or a PM time.

This is the best I've been able to get so far for a timestamp in the
prompt that updates every time the prompt is displayed:

  [9:00] ~>

This is acceptable:

  [09:00] ~>

This is most preferred:

  [0900] ~>

There must be some way to do this.  Right?

-- 
Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ]
Jon Postel, RFC 761: "[B]e conservative in what you do, be liberal in
what you accept from others."
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