How can I measure the execution time of a terminal process?

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?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

You can use time:

time ls -R