Parse ps' “etime” output and convert it into seconds

Question

These are possible output formats for ps h -eo etime

21-18:26:30
   15:28:37
      48:14
      00:01

How to parse them into se

Answer 1

I've implemented a 100% bash solution as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

etime_to_seconds() {
  local time_string="$1"
  local time_string_array=()
  local time_seconds=0
  local return_status=0

  [[ -z "${time_string}" ]] && return 255

  # etime string returned by ps(1) consists one of three formats:
  #         31:24 (less than 1 hour)
  #      23:22:38 (less than 1 day)
  #   01-00:54:47 (more than 1 day)
  #

  # convert days component into just another element
  time_string="${time_string//-/:}"

  # split time_string into components separated by ':'
  time_string_array=( ${time_string//:/ } )

  # parse the array in reverse (smallest unit to largest)
  local _elem=""
  local _indx=1
  for(( i=${#time_string_array[@]}; i>0; i-- )); do
    _elem="${time_string_array[$i-1]}"
    # convert to base 10
    _elem=$(( 10#${_elem} ))
    case ${_indx} in
      1 )
        (( time_seconds+=${_elem} ))
        ;;
      2 )
        (( time_seconds+=${_elem}*60 ))
        ;;
      3 )
        (( time_seconds+=${_elem}*3600 ))
        ;;
      4 )
        (( time_seconds+=${_elem}*86400 ))
        ;;
    esac
    (( _indx++ ))
  done
  unset _indx
  unset _elem

  echo -n "$time_seconds"; return $return_status
}

main() {
  local time_string_array=( "31:24" "23:22:38" "06-00:15:30" "09:10" )

  for timeStr in "${time_string_array[@]}"; do

      local _secs="$(etime_to_seconds "$timeStr")"
      echo "           timeStr: "$timeStr""
      echo "  etime_to_seconds: ${_secs}"
  done

}

main

Answer 2

Try to use my solution with sed+awk:

ps --pid $YOUR_PID -o etime= | sed 's/:\|-/ /g;' |\ 
awk '{print $4" "$3" "$2" "$1}' |\
awk '{print $1+$2*60+$3*3600+$4*86400}'

it splits the string with sed, then inverts the numbers backwards ("DD hh mm ss" -> "ss mm hh DD") and calculates them with awk.

$ echo 21-18:26:30 | sed 's/:\|-/ /g;' | awk '{print $4" "$3" "$2" "$1}' | awk '{print $1+$2*60+$3*3600+$4*86400}'
1880790
$ echo 15:28:37 | sed 's/:\|-/ /g;' | awk '{print $4" "$3" "$2" "$1}' | awk '{print $1+$2*60+$3*3600+$4*86400}'
55717
$ echo 48:14 | sed 's/:\|-/ /g;' | awk '{print $4" "$3" "$2" "$1}' | awk '{print $1+$2*60+$3*3600+$4*86400}'
2894
$ echo 00:01 | sed 's/:\|-/ /g;' | awk '{print $4" "$3" "$2" "$1}' | awk '{print $1+$2*60+$3*3600+$4*86400}'
1

Also you can play with sed and remove all non-numeric characters from input string:

sed 's/[^0-9]/ /g;' | awk '{print $4" "$3" "$2" "$1}' | awk '{print $1+$2*60+$3*3600+$4*86400}'

Answer 3

I just had to add my version, heavily based on the elegant perl one-liner by @andor (beautiful perl code!)

• time : total CPU time since beginning (? or some computation of it, that is decayed if cpu usage goes down? I am not sure.... a high number signals a cpu intensive process, though)
• etime: total time elapsed since the process started
• the 2 ways for tail : on linux : tail +2 doesn't work. On solaris, tail -n +2 doesn't work. So I try both to be sure.

Here is how to compute the times and also sort your processes by their mean CPU usage over time

ps -eo pid,comm,etime,time | { tail +2 2>/dev/null || tail -n +2 ;} | perl -ane '
    @e=reverse split(/[:-]/,$F[2]); $se=$e[0]+$e[1]*60+$e[2]*3600+$e[3]*86400;
    @t=reverse split(/[:-]/,$F[3]); $st=$t[0]+$t[1]*60+$t[2]*3600+$t[4]*86400; 
    if ( $se == 0 ) { $pct=0 ; } else { $pct=$st/$se ;};
    printf "%s\t%s\t%s(%sseconds)\t%s(%sseconds)\t%.4f%%\n",$F[0],$F[1],$F[2],$se,$F[3],$st,$pct*100;
   '  | sort -k5,5n

Answer 4

Here's a PHP alternative, readable and fully unit-tested:

//Convert the etime string $s (as returned by the `ps` command) into seconds
function parse_etime($s) {
    $m = array();
    preg_match("/^(([\d]+)-)?(([\d]+):)?([\d]+):([\d]+)$/", trim($s), $m); //Man page for `ps` says that the format for etime is [[dd-]hh:]mm:ss
    return
        $m[2]*86400+    //Days
        $m[4]*3600+     //Hours
        $m[5]*60+       //Minutes
        $m[6];          //Seconds
}

Answer 5

With awk:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f  
BEGIN { FS = ":" }
{
  if (NF == 2) {
    print $1*60 + $2
  } else if (NF == 3) {
    split($1, a, "-");
    if (a[2] != "" ) {
      print ((a[1]*24+a[2])*60 + $2) * 60 + $3;
    } else {
      print ($1*60 + $2) * 60 + $3;
    }
  }
}

Run with :

awk -f script.awk datafile

Output:

1880790
55717
2894
1

And finally, if you want to pipe to the parser, you can do something like this:

ps h -eo etime | ./script.awk

Answer 6

Another bash option as a function; uses tac and bc for math.

function etime2sec () {
   # 21-18:26:30
   #    15:28:37
   #       48:14
   #       00:01
etimein=$1
hassec=no ; hasmin=no ; hashr=no ; hasday=no
newline=`echo "${etimein}" | tr ':' '-' | tr '-' ' ' | tac -s " " | tr '\n' ' '`
for thispiece in $(echo "${etimein}" | tr ':' '-' | tr '-' ' ' | tac -s " " | tr '\n' ' ') ; do
  if [[ $hassec = no ]] ; then
    totsec=$thispiece
    hassec=yes
  elif [[ $hasmin = no ]] ; then
    totsec=`echo "$totsec + ($thispiece * 60)" | bc`
    hasmin=yes
  elif [[ $hashr = no ]] ; then
    totsec=`echo "$totsec + ($thispiece * 3600)" | bc`
    hashr=yes
  elif [[ $hasday = no ]] ; then
    totsec=`echo "$totsec + ($thispiece * 86400)" | bc`
    hashr=yes
  fi
done
echo $totsec
}