I'm trying to measure the execution time of a process that I call via the command line (i.e., I want to find out how long it takes to for the process to finish). Is there any command that I can add to the command calling the process that will achieve this?

7 Answers

Add time before the command you want to measure. For example: time ls.

The output will look like:

real 0m0.606s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.002s

Explanation on real, user and sys (from man time):

• real: Elapsed real (wall clock) time used by the process, in seconds.
• user: Total number of CPU-seconds that the process used directly (in user mode), in seconds.
• sys: Total number of CPU-seconds used by the system on behalf of the process (in kernel mode), in seconds.

5

For a line-by-line delta measurement, try gnomon.

It is a command line utility, a bit like moreutils's ts, to prepend timestamp information to the standard output of another command. Useful for long-running processes where you'd like a historical record of what's taking so long.

Piping anything to gnomon will prepend a timestamp to each line, indicating how long that line was the last line in the buffer--that is, how long it took the next line to appear. By default, gnomon will display the seconds elapsed between each line, but that is configurable.

4

You can use time:

time ls -R

date +"%T" && cp -r ./file /destination/folder/here && date +"%T"

Running this command in the terminal will give you the total time for coping a file

3

Occasionally I find myself needing a stopwatch to count how long it takes for an action like my app booting, in which case many of the solutions here are not useful.

For this I like to use sw.

Install

wget -q -O - | sh -s -- -u 

Usage

sw - start a stopwatch from 0, save start time in ~/.sw
sw [-r|--resume] - start a stopwatch from the last saved start time (or current time if no last saved start time exists) - "-r" stands for --resume

time -v command

-v gives more information

2

1) Open bashrc file

gedit ~\.bashrc

2) Find the following text:

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\] :\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ' 

3) And replace with:

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u\[\033[00m\] [\d|\t]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ' 

4) Restart terminal to check.

Sample output in terminal

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Sign up using Google Sign up using Facebook Sign up using Email and Password Submit

Post as a guest

Post Your Answer Discard

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy