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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?

htorque
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9 Answers9

303

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.
Daniel
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ninjalj
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    @ninjalj, can you provide more information on what the real, user, and sys times are that this command returns? – Knowledge Cube Jul 17 '11 at 20:22
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    @JacobVlijm This answer isn't that elaborate. :) You could edit in your comment and make it so. – muru Feb 13 '15 at 16:43
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    Note that you may need sudo apt-get install time if you are using a shell where time is not a builtin. – poolie Oct 26 '16 at 16:45
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    Note that this is the output from Bash's time builtin, but man time would be about an executable (like /usr/bin/time, from the time package), and its output would look different. Also in Bash, you can run help time for help with the builtin. – wjandrea Mar 25 '19 at 21:08
  • Note that the process end does not mean all the work is finished. A copy may take additional minutes after the "time" returns for flushing system bufffers (therefor with unallocated sys time also). – ubfan1 Jun 23 '19 at 16:25
  • OMG! It is integrated in MacOS zhs already – canbax Feb 22 '23 at 12:04
  • For some reason, time echo foo don't display the time. Is there a way to display the time independent of the command when using time? – Vencovsky Apr 12 '23 at 07:39
  • fish shell users: time is a fish builtin. If you want the standard version on your system, use command time ... – BallpointBen Dec 08 '23 at 20:48
64

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.

gnomon demo

Community
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Janus Troelsen
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32

You can use time:

time ls -R
William Niu
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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

Parto
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user314473
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    This will give you the start time and end time, not the duration. – wjandrea Mar 25 '19 at 19:31
  • This is a good answer, under some circumstances. For example, the following find command -- without the 2>/dev/null redirect -- gives copious Permission denied messages. However, adding 2>/dev/null to that command breaks the time portion of that command. The following provides a good compromise: START="$(date +"%s")" && find 2>/dev/null / -path /mnt -prune -o -name "*libname-server-2.a*" -print; END="$(date +"%s")"; TIME="$((END - START))"; printf 'find command took %s sec\n' "$TIME", giving (e.g.) /usr/lib/libname-server-2.a find command took 3 sec as the sole output. – Victoria Stuart May 22 '19 at 03:45
  • An addendum to my comment: of course, you can simply run time sudo find / -path /mnt -prune -o -name "*libname-server-2.a*" -print (i.e., as sudo) -- avoiding those numerous Permission denied warnings. – Victoria Stuart May 22 '19 at 16:04
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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.

sw

Install

wget -q -O - http://git.io/sinister | sh -s -- -u https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coryfklein/sw/master/sw

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
Cory Klein
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3
time -v command

-v gives more information

Himanshu Mishra
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3

In zsh, the time command's output is slightly different.

To interpret the output:

time sleep 10
sleep 10  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 10.011 total

The last number gives the total time as though it were recorded with a real life stopwatch (what you want 99% of the time). The other values are explained here.

muru
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stevec
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0

In Nushell, the command is timeit instead of time.

> timeit java -jar benchmark.jar concurrency
[program output]
3min 42sec 994ms 803µs 978ns
jobukkit
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-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

muru
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Gaurav Singh
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    This will show the time. It will neither build the difference to the last command, nor will it account for waiting to type and hit ENTER or typing the command. – user unknown Nov 15 '22 at 23:54