how to time length of process invoked from the command line ?

[dan]

Craig Thomas wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Does anyone know of a simple way to determine how long any given command
> takes to run when issued from the command line?  I've googled and turned
> up lots of timing a process type results...but I've had no luck
> recognizing a solution [poor google searches -- not sure what I'm
> searching for really].  I'm creating some cron jobs for backups and just
> want to schedule them far enough apart I'm not writing old data.
> 
> there's surely something like this that will do what I need:
> 
> #tar -czf ~/.evolution email.tar.gz | someapptotimemyprocess
> 
> Any help greatly appreciated.
> 
> TIA,
> 

You can prefix your command with the command "time":

time "tar -czf ~/.evolution email.tar.gz"

Thanks
-dant