time command in Unix is used to find the time taken by a particular command to execute. This is very useful when we want to time a particular command or a particular script to know the amount of time it consumes. Not only the elapsed time, the time command also tells the amount of time spent in the user and kernel spaces as well.
$ time real 0m0.000s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.000stime command output shows 3 different components:
real - The total time elapsed during the command which includes the time taken for the process.
user - The time taken for the process only in the user space. This does not include kernel calls.
sys - The time taken for the process in system space (for kernel related calls )
1. Using time for a command:
$ time ls f1.c f2.c real 0m0.01s user 0m0.00s sys 0m0.01sThis indicates the ls command has taken a total of 0.01 second to finish, which is the time elapsed.
2. Using time command for a simple script:
Let us write a script, try.sh, which prints a welcome message:
$ cat try.sh #!/bin/bash echo "welcome"Running the time command:
$ time ./try.sh welcome real 0m0.03s user 0m0.01s sys 0m0.02sThis script has taken a total of 0.03 seconds to execute.
3. Timing the sleep in the script:
sleep command's duration do not go against user or sys, it is always against the real output.
$ cat try.sh #!/bin/bash sleep 3 echo "welcome"Running the time command:
$ time ./try.sh welcome real 0m3.04s user 0m0.03s sys 0m0.01s
As seen above, the sleep duration goes entirely in the real, not in the user or sys.
Capturing time output:
time command output is re-directed to standard error terminal, and not standard output like other Unix commands. Hence, time command output cannot be re-directed to a file in a normal way.
1. To retrieve only the real time of the time output:
$ time ./try.sh | grep real welcome real 0m1.05s user 0m0.02s sys 0m0.04sAs seen, grep does not help since the time command output is not in the STDOUT.
$ (time ./try.sh) 2>&1 | grep real real 0m1.05sBy re-directing the standard error to standard output, the time command output can now be passed as standard input to other commands.
2. To re-direct the time command output to a file:
$ (time ls ) 2>file
No comments:
Post a Comment