How to print last login time?

Question

I'd like to know how to set in .bashrc file to print the last login time of users when logging into another user in terminal. I do know that with who or last, but I'd like something a little more customizable that can be formatted and only runs once per login, preferably to show in a format like so;

last login time [ 2015-02-13 @ 3:50:00 AM ]
user@host /path/dir/here $

that gets printed to the terminal screen before the bash prompt, and if possible to set and format color on the time and date stamp. How can I achieve this to customizing the bash prompt output?

Answer 1

(Just as a guideline, the format is not exactly the same):

ll=$(last -1 -R  $USER | head -1 | cut -c 20-)
export PS1="last login time [$ll]"'\n\h:\W\$ '

Edit: if you want last information to be printed only once (wise idea)

ll=$(last -1 -R  $USER | head -1 | cut -c 20-)
echo "last login time [$ll]"    # adjust to your login messages, fortunes, etc
export PS1='\n\h:\W\$ '         # replace by your favorite prompt

Answer 2

Try putting the following line into your /etc/profile file ...

echo "your last login:  `last -1 -R $USER` "

This will limit the results to 1 line and report the user's last login, during the login process. Afterwards it will not re-occur until the next login.