System Resources Usage When Running Unix commands

In my system administration job, I come across this particular requirement quite often: run a command, then confirm how long it took to complete the job. You guessed it right – there's a very easy way to do it.

Using the time command

What you need to do is to use the time command, which takes as a parameter the full command line you need to run. Upon completion of the command, time will report the system resources usage during the execution. All the reported numbers are presented in a simple table.

Here's an example: running du command to confirm the size of a directory while timing the effort and reporting the stats:

ubuntu# time du -sk /var
4228720 /var

real    0m17.747s
user    0m0.010s
sys     0m0.080s

As you can see, first the du command output is shown, and then the table with real, user and system times reported.

See also:

• Time and date in Unix scripts
• Finding large files and directories
• Unix commands section

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