Grep time command output

Question

Using time ls, I have the following output:

$ time ls -l 
total 2
-rwx------+ 1 FRIENDS None 97 Jun 23 08:59 location.txt
-rw-r--r--+ 1 FRIENDS None         


        

Answer 1

If you just want to specify the output format of time builtin, you can modify the value of TIMEFORMAT environment variable instead of filtering it with grep.

In you case,

TIMEFORMAT=%R
time ls -l

would give you the "real" time only.

Here's the link to relevant information in Bash manual (under "TIMEFORMAT").

This is a similar question on SO about parsing the output of time.