Measure time of program execution

The time command in Linux is used to determine the duration of execution of a command. This command is useful when you want to know the exection time of a command or a script. By default, three times are displayed:

• real time – the total execution time. This is the time elapsed between invocation and termination of the command.
• user CPU time – the CPU time used by your process.
• system CPU time – the CPU time used by the system on behalf of your process.

Here is an example. The following command will report how long it took to execute the find ./* -name “*file*” command:

The time command can also be used to track the execution time of scripts:

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