[CentOS] time command with options

Filipe Brandenburger filbranden at gmail.com
Wed Jan 14 01:50:49 UTC 2009


Hi,

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 13:24, nate <centos at linuxpowered.net> wrote:
> Try /usr/bin/time instead of 'time', I believe 'time' is a internal
> command for bash as well.

Right.

However, /usr/bin/time won't accept the syntax above, this will not work:
$ /usr/bin/time { date; }

Of course you can:
$ /usr/bin/time date

Or:
$ /usr/bin/time sh -c '{ date; }'

Or:
$ /usr/bin/time bash -c '{ date; }'

If you want to use the external binary instead of the built-in, but
you don't want to type the full path, you can use the trick to add a
backslash in front of the command name:
$ \time -o file date

If you want to use the built-in "time" available in bash, you can get
a reference to its options with the command:
$ help time

You will see that the only option it supports is -p to slightly change
the format, but not -o for the output. You should do redirection with
> and/or 2> to write to a file.

Another advantage of the built-in is that it does time a full
pipeline. For example, this will time both date and grep:
$ time date | grep Sat

While this will time date only:
$ /usr/bin/time date | grep Sat

HTH,
Filipe



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