Windows equivalent to UNIX "time" command

Question

So, Unix has a time command that lets users time their code/other things. I was wondering if the Windows command line has anything similar.

Also, I asked a previous question regarding the Linux command line here. Can we do the same for Windows? If so, how?

Answer 1

Use Powershell

Measure-Command {start-process whateveryouwantexecute -Wait}

Edited to your need @efficiencylsBliss:

Measure-Command {start-process java -argumentlist "whateverargumentisneeded" -wait}

Answer 2

I'm using Win XP, for some reason, timeit.exe is not working for me. I found another alternative: ptime:

ptime 1.0 - Accurately measure program execution time

ptime will run any specified command and parameters, and measure the execution time (run time) in seconds, accurate to 5 millisecond or better. It is an automatic process timer, or program timer used for benchmark purposes.

Answer 3

You can cheat a little with a batch script...

@echo off
echo %time% < nul
cmd /c %1
echo %time% < nul

Then run your program as an argument to this script...

timer myprogram.exe

and for arguments...

timer "myprogram.exe -sw1 -sw2"

example output:

17:59:20.02
some text
17:59:20.03

place the batch script somewhere in your PATH variable, e.g. C:\Windows\System32 and name it timer.cmd. Of course there is a small performance hit of forking a second cmd instance, although very minimal.

Answer 4

For ease of use, here is the chocolatey package: https://chocolatey.org/packages/ptime C:/> choco install ptime

The advantage if ptime is that it acts like the unix version and yields the console output, which Measure-Command { XXX } does not (or at least I don't know how to do that).

Answer 5

Some coffee helped me come up with this:

function time { $Command = "$args"; Measure-Command { Invoke-Expression $Command 2>&1 | out-default} }

And if you want it to output nothing, just replace with out-null:

function timequiet { $Command = "$args"; Measure-Command { Invoke-Expression $Command 2>&1 | out-null} }

You use it like this:

PS C:\> time sleep 5


Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 4
Milliseconds      : 990
Ticks             : 49906722
TotalDays         : 5,77624097222222E-05
TotalHours        : 0,00138629783333333
TotalMinutes      : 0,08317787
TotalSeconds      : 4,9906722
TotalMilliseconds : 4990,6722



PS C:\>

Answer 6

There is no direct equivalent to Unix time on Windows.

The University of Georgia have a brief list of Windows commands for Unix users

I find the older Windows command prompt and .bat scripting is rather limited compared to Unix shells but there are some facilities for looping over files etc. CommandWindows.com has some tips

You could either install bash on Windows (e.g. by installing CygWin) or learn Windows Powershell (which I am assuming has a means of doing something equivalent).

Answer 7

gnomon is a nice solution if you don't only need the total run time of a command, but also line for line measurements:

A command line utility to prepend timestamp information to the standard output of another command. Useful for long-running processes where you'd like a historical record of what's taking so long.

Installed by running npm install -g gnomon, then just use it via command | gnomon.

Answer 8

The output for your code can be piped to a file: java test <inputfile> | Out-File d:\a.txt

For measuring how long it takes you have to encapsulate it in Measure-Commmand:

Measure-Commmand {java test <inputfile> | Out-File d:\a.txt}

Answer 9

If you try to use PowerShell with Measure-Command be aware that there may be some unexpected gotchas. My command writes binary data to a file using > redirection but PowerShell added a BOM to the beginning of the file and a CRLF line break after every write!

Answer 10

An improvement on Andrei Ghimus's answer.

function time {
    $Command = $MyInvocation.Line -Replace ("^$($MyInvocation.MyCommand) ", "")
    Measure-Command { Invoke-Expression $Command | Out-Default }
}

The use of MyInvocation allows obtaining the actual arguments which is important when the command contains double quotes.

I found the 2>&1 just hid stderr which isn't what I wanted.

Answer 11

You can write C++ code using Windows API to create a utility tool for yourself.

Possible reasons to do so:

• You don't want to use PowerShell.
• You want more control of the time program. You may consider falling back to cmd /c <COMMAND> if <COMMAND> can only be interpreted by cmd.exe.
• Normally, utility tools (e.g. ptime and MSYS2 time) take the process creation time into account. But Measure-Command in PowerShell does not. To get a closer estimation, you can record start time after the creating subprocess and before waiting for it. If you do want to include process creation time, just move the line where the start time is recorded.

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <chrono>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <process.h>

using namespace std::chrono;

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    if (argc < 2) {
        fprintf(stderr, "** Error: no command provided\n");
        exit(1);
    }
    
    printf("Running ");
    for (int i = 1; i < argc; ++i)
        printf("[%s] ", argv[i]);
    printf("\n");

    auto handle = _spawnvp(_P_NOWAIT, argv[1], &argv[1]);
    if (handle < 0) {
        perror("_spawnv failed");
        exit(1);
    }
    auto start_time = high_resolution_clock::now();
    int status;
    if (_cwait(&status, handle, _WAIT_CHILD) == -1) {
        perror("_cwait failed");
        exit(1);
    }

    auto end_time = high_resolution_clock::now();
    auto duration = duration_cast<milliseconds>(end_time - start_time);
    printf("duration: %lld ms\n", duration.count());
}

Assume the utility is mtime. Run mtime mtime in cmd:

cmd> mtime mtime
Running [mtime] 
** Error: no command provided
duration: 5 ms

The first mtime measures the running time of the second mtime, which fails fast (and can be considered as a "Hello World" program). Result should be 5 ~ 7 ms, and is so close to Measure-Command's estimation:

PowerShell> measure-command{.\mtime|Out-Default}
** Error: no command provided


Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 6
Ticks             : 64007
TotalDays         : 7.40821759259259E-08
TotalHours        : 1.77797222222222E-06
TotalMinutes      : 0.000106678333333333
TotalSeconds      : 0.0064007
TotalMilliseconds : 6.4007

If you count process creation time, the result should be about 11 ms. (Process creation is much slower on Windows than on Linux.)

Caveats:

• Do not pass _P_WAIT to _spawnvp. That way, when the subprocess exits with a non-zero code, your measuring program will fail as well (because it cannot tell whether process creation fails or subprocess exits abnormally).
• Use cl.exe or clang++.exe to compile. Do not use g++.exe, because it cannot optimize Windows API as well as the other two. (My g++ version is g++ (Rev1, Built by MSYS2 project) 11.3.0, and clang++ version is clang version 14.0.0; Target: x86_64-pc-windows-msvc)
• In PowerShell, measure-command{<COMMAND>|Out-Default} takes longer if <COMMAND> can only be resolved in PATH and your PATH is long (for my laptop it takes 14 ms for a "Hello World" exe at the bottom of PATH). In cmd, executable files are cached, so consecutive same commands run faster even if full path is not specified.

In my test, the program was compiled with no optimization. If you turn it on, program should be a little bit faster.

Answer 12

There are a couple different options to get a 'time' command. My preference is to just install Cygwin (which comes with a UNIX-like time command).

Alternatively, you can write a script and add it to your path (so that you can execute it without specifying the entire path).

If you have Powershell available, try this script (works when calling files--'.exe',etc.):

$start = get-date
if ($args.length -gt 1) {
start-process $args[0] $args[1..$args.length] -workingdirectory $pwd -nonewwindow -wait
} else {
start-process $args[0] -workingdirectory $pwd -nonewwindow -wait
}
$end = get-date
$elapsed = $end - $start
write-host $end-$start
# datetime format
write-host $elapsed
# easy-to-read format
echo $elapsed

Run the code with (for instance):

time.ps1 python program.py

Using Batch, I'd suggest either of the top answers from here (on Stackoverflow.com). Both just need to be copy-pasted. Note that if you use paxdiablo's solution, you should replace

ping -n 11 127.0.0.1 >nul: 2>nul: 

with

%*