Add function that returns start timestamp of just invocation

[casey]

@page-down, what did you have in mind here, and what were you thinking of using it for?

[page-down]

It is still mainly caused by the original problem that the processes in recipes cannot share and know the overall situation.

For example, this is used to output in each recipe the overall time that has elapsed at the time the step is completed. The last step outputs the overall time spent.

A "started_at := date +%s" solves it, but adds process overhead and is not cross-platform portable.

I see that the date and time functions are currently missing. If you still want to extend it, you can think in this direction. It's good to try to cover some common utility functions, I think. The catch is that it doesn't cause just bloat.

[casey]

That all makes sense. I think start_timestamp(), which returns seconds after the epoch, would be good to add. New functions that don't require adding additional dependencies shouldn't create bloat, and are probably worth it even if only a few people find them useful.