Time will tell
Sometimes it is interesting to see how long a program took to run. This is usefull to see how long a backup took to be complete, how long you surfed the net, or many other things.
This is taken from one of my posts to a mailing-list I used to subscribe:
Date
stw@laptop:~> date ; echo This line intentionally left blank ; sleep 5 ; date
Sa Jun 18 20:47:59 CEST 2005
This line intentionally left blank
Sa Jun 18 20:48:04 CEST 2005
which will tell you start and end of the run of the program (tar, netscape, whatever). You have to do the math on your own.
Time
‘time’ does this:
stw@laptop:~> time sleep 5
real 0m5.066s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.002s
So we know how long the nap really was, and how much time the CPU spent to run the sleep-application. The drawback is that ‘time’ only times one command. So if you want to time pipes or multiple commands that run after each other, you need to put them into a script and time that script, or use ‘date’ and do the math… :(
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tutorials/advanced/realworld/time_will_tell.txt · Last modified: 2008/07/20 19:08
Welcome to LinuxBasics.org - The online community that helps people to get Linux installed and running.
During this tour, we will guide you through our website, which has many facets which wait to be explored
The biggest project we are running is our Linux course, based on the LBook.
The book is stored in wiki-format, which enables us to update and correct it as we go.
Discussion for the course is on our Forum
Our Forum is used for discussion of Linux and for questions and answers.
Search the mailing-list that was used prior to the Forum.
The questions and answers from the list are stored in the list's archives in order to help others with the same problems.
Every weekend, we meet to chat in IRC. These meetings are NOT mandatory, but are a nice chance to get to know each other better.
IRC is also a great tool to solve many problems, since it is very quick and easy to ask for more details if you need them.
The tutorials are one of the oldest sections on the LBo-website.
Here you find explanations on how to do specific tasks in Linux. Many of the tutorials were created after a certain problem
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In the links section, you find outbound links to other valuable resources.
One of our later additions to the site. We maintain a mirror of the Linux Documentation Project. This is our contribution to the "home of the HOWTOs"
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We are looking forward to meeting you at LinuxBasics.org
Anita, Jisao, Sam and Stefan