Get The Time It Takes To Run A Command

Category: Linux

You can get how long it takes to run a command with time.

For example, to show how long it takes to clone a GitHub repo:

time git clone https://github.com/iamgbsmith/react-wordle.git boardle

Output

Cloning into 'boardle'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 127, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (127/127), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (115/115), done.
remote: Total 127 (delta 11), reused 124 (delta 8), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (127/127), 4.36 MiB | 5.42 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (11/11), done.

real	0m2.169s
user	0m0.164s
sys     0m0.168s

real refers to actual elapsed time
user is the amount of CPU time spent in user-mode code (outside the kernel)
sys is the amount of CPU time spent in the kernel within the process

The time command also works similarly on macOS.