Save in a variable the number of seconds a process took to run

Question

I want to run a process in bash and save in an env variable the number of seconds it took to run. How would I do such a thing?

Answer 1

This works in Bash, and also Zsh:

# Set time format to seconds
TIMEFORMAT=%R
# Time a process
PROC_TIME=$(time (insert command here >/dev/null 2>&1) 2>&1)
echo $PROC_TIME

• The first two redirections hide your process's output ">/dev/null 2>&1"
• The last redirect is needed because "time" prints the time on stderr