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

Use the time command. Note that the bash version of time is not the same as /usr/bin/time. So you would have something like:

TIME=`/usr/bin/time --format="%e" your_command_here >/dev/null`

The format just pulls the "real" time value out. You would need to convert that from a string if you wanted to do anything more than display it.

If you just want to export the string, use export.