time

The time command runs the specified program command with the given arguments. When command finishes, time writes a message to standard error giving timing statistics about this program run. These statistics consist of (i) the elapsed real time between invocation and termination, (ii) the user CPU time, and (iii) the system CPU time.

• time [EN] @ Wikipedia

Documentation

• man 1 'time' [EN]

Syntax

time [PARAMETER ...] COMMAND

Parameters

-f FORMAT, --format=FORMAT

Specify output FORMAT, possibly overriding the format specified in the environment variable TIMEFORMAT.

Format

Time

%E

Elapsed real time (in [hours:]minutes:seconds).

%P

Percentage of the CPU that this job got, computed as (%U + %S) / %E.

%S

Total number of CPU-seconds that the process spent in kernel mode.

%U

Total number of CPU-seconds that the process spent in user mode.

Examples

time ls -la

Output:

total 337
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 alex       alex      0 Oct 11 15:10 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 root       root      0 Mar  4  2010 ..
...

real    0m0.125s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.015s