Get program execution time in the shell

Question

I want to execute something in a linux shell under a few different conditions, and be able to output the execution time of each execution.

I know I could write a perl or python script that would do this, but is there a way I can do it in the shell? (which happens to be bash)

Answer 1

Use the built-in time command:

$ help time

time: time [-p] PIPELINE
    Execute PIPELINE and print a summary of the real time, user CPU time,
    and system CPU time spent executing PIPELINE when it terminates.
    The return status is the return status of PIPELINE.  The `-p' option
    prints the timing summary in a slightly different format.  This uses
    the value of the TIMEFORMAT variable as the output format.
times: times
    Print the accumulated user and system times for processes run from
    the shell.

Example:

$ time sleep 2

real    0m2.009s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.004s

Answer 2

You can get much more detailed information than the bash built-in time (which Robert Gamble mentions) using time(1). Normally /usr/bin/time

Example of verbose output:

$ /usr/bin/time -v sleep 1
       Command being timed: "sleep 1"
       User time (seconds): 0.00
       System time (seconds): 0.00
       Percent of CPU this job got: 1%
       Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:01.05
       Average shared text size (kbytes): 0
       Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0
       Average stack size (kbytes): 0
       Average total size (kbytes): 0
       Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 0
       Average resident set size (kbytes): 0
       Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0
       Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 210
       Voluntary context switches: 2
       Involuntary context switches: 1
       Swaps: 0
       File system inputs: 0
       File system outputs: 0
       Socket messages sent: 0
       Socket messages received: 0
       Signals delivered: 0
       Page size (bytes): 4096
       Exit status: 0

Answer 3

If you intend to use the times later to compute with, learn how to use the -f option of /usr/bin/time to output code that saves times. Here's some code I used recently to get and sort the execution times of a whole classful of students' programs:

fmt="run { date = '$(date)', user = '$who', test = '$test', host = '$(hostname)', times = { user = %U, system = %S, elapsed = %e } }"
/usr/bin/time -f "$fmt" -o $timefile command args...

I later concatenated all the $timefile files and pipe the output into a Lua interpreter. You can do the same with Python or bash or whatever your favorite syntax is. I love this technique.