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user848635
Asked: 2011-07-18 04:26:45 +0800 CST

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

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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?

command-line

7 Answers

  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.
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  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.

    gnomon demo

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  3. You can use time:

    time ls -R
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  4. 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

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  5. 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
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  6. time -v command

    -v gives more information

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  7. 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

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