TIME(1) General Commands Manual TIME(1)

time — time command execution

time [-al] [-h | -p] [-o file] utility [argument ...]

The time utility executes and times the specified utility. After the utility finishes, time writes to the standard error stream, (in seconds): the total time elapsed, the time used to execute the utility process and the time consumed by system overhead.

The following options are available:

If the -o flag is used, append to the specified file rather than overwriting it. Otherwise, this option has no effect.
Print times in a human friendly format. Times are printed in minutes, hours, etc. as appropriate.
The contents of the rusage structure are printed as well.
file
Write the output to file instead of stderr. If file exists and the -a flag is not specified, the file will be overwritten.
Makes time output POSIX.2 compliant (each time is printed on its own line).

Some shells may provide a builtin time command which is similar or identical to this utility. Consult the builtin(1) manual page.

If time receives a SIGINFO (see the status argument for stty(1)) signal, the current time the given command is running will be written to the standard output.

The PATH environment variable is used to locate the requested utility if the name contains no ‘/’ characters.

If utility could be timed successfully, its exit status is returned. If utility terminated abnormally, a warning message is output to stderr. If the utility was found but could not be run, the exit status is 126. If no utility could be found at all, the exit status is 127. If time encounters any other error, the exit status is between 1 and 125 included.

Time the execution of ls(1) on an empty directory:

$ /usr/bin/time ls
        0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys

Time the execution of the cp(1) command and store the result in the times.txt file. Then execute the command again to make a new copy and add the result to the same file:

$ /usr/bin/time -o times.txt cp FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso copy1.iso
$ /usr/bin/time -a -o times.txt cp FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso copy2.iso

The times.txt file will contain the times of both commands:

$ cat times.txt
        0.68 real         0.00 user         0.22 sys
        0.67 real         0.00 user         0.21 sys

Time the sleep(1) command and show the results in a human friendly format. Show the contents of the rusage structure too:

$ /usr/bin/time -l -h -p sleep 5
real 5.01
user 0.00
sys 0.00
         0  maximum resident set size
         0  average shared memory size
         0  average unshared data size
         0  average unshared stack size
        80  page reclaims
         0  page faults
         0  swaps
         1  block input operations
         0  block output operations
         0  messages sent
         0  messages received
         0  signals received
         3  voluntary context switches
         0  involuntary context switches
   2054316  instructions retired
   2445544  cycles elapsed
    241664  peak memory footprint

builtin(1), csh(1), getrusage(2), wait(2)

The time utility is expected to conform to ISO/IEC 9945-2:1993 (``POSIX'').

A time utility appeared in Version 3 AT&T UNIX.

January 15, 2021 macOS 15.2