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In Process
Tat Mush
Asked: 2018-12-20 02:24:41 +0800 CST

How to check when a process stopped running? [duplicate]

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I'm trying to figure out when a command I entered stopped executing, for example

sudo apt-get update

I want information like: 

started execution at : 12:00
finished execution at : 12:15
command-line process logs

2 Answers

  1. Key point that should be understood about processes is that their metadata is not logged by default. You can, however, obtain certain information while process runs.

    As has been stated in related StackOverflow question in wlk's answer, start time can be obtained via -o flag to ps and ltime format specifier:

    ps -eo pid,lstart,cmd

    Stop time, however, is not tracked by the system usually, so that's something you'll have to track yourself. Knowing PID of a process, you could poll for that PID existence, and echo the timestamp when it disappears

    while kill -s 0 $pid ; do : ; sleep 0.25 ; done && date

    See also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5207048/3701431

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  2. How about writing our own bash script?

    #!/bin/bash

start_time=$(date +"%T")

$*                    

finish_time=$(date +"%T")

echo "started execution at : $start_time"
echo "finished execution at : $finish_time"

    Save the script as logscript.sh

    Make it executable by using chmod +x logscript.sh

    You can run 'command' using ./logscript.sh command

    For example, ./logscript.sh sudo apt-get update

    Screenshot of the result

    Check this site for interesting time-display formats.

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