Korn Shell Programming by Example

time

Official Description

Times the execution of a command.

Syntax

time [-p] command [argument...]

Options

-p writes the timing output to standard error (may not be available on all UNIX variants).

Oddities

The C shell has its own version of this command.

Example

$ time ls b*
buzz  buzz1  buzz10  buzz2  buzz3  buzz4

real    0m0.02s              # Elapsed time
user    0m0.00s              # User mode processing time
sys     0m0.02s              # Kernel (system) mode processing time
$