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

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 14:30 +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> 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,
> > 
> time tar -czf ~/.evolution email.tar.gz
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^   ^^^^^^^^^^

Both of you have this reversed.
The filename to be created comes right after the -f option, the
files/directories to be tarred follow that.