- Time (Unix)
time
is a command in theUnix operating systems. It is used to determine the duration of execution of a particular command.Usage
To use the command, simply precede any command by the word
time
, such as:When the command completes,
time
will report how long it took to execute the
command in terms of userls CPU time , system CPU time, and real time. The output format varies between different versions of the command, and some give additional statistics, as in this example:$ time host wikipedia.org wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235 0.000u 0.000s 0:00.17 0.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w $
time(1) can exist as a standalone program (such as
GNU time) or as a shell builtin (e.g. intcsh or inzsh ).User Time vs System Time
The term 'user CPU time' can be a bit misleading at first. To be clear the total time ("real CPU time"), is the combination of the amount of time the CPU spends performing some action for a program and the amount of time the CPU spends performing
system call s for the kernel on the program's behalf. When a program loops through an array, it is accumulating user CPU time. Conversely, when a program executes asystem call such asexec
orfork
, it is accumulating system CPU time.Method of operation
According to the source code of the GNU implementation of
time
, most information shown bytime
is derived from thewait3
system call. On systems that do not have await3
call that returns status information, thetimes
system call is used instead.See also
*
List of Unix programs
*System time
*Unix time
*Cron process for scheduling jobs to run at a particular time.References
*man|cu|time|SUS|time a simple command
*man|1|time|Linux|time a simple command or give resource usage
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.