Windows command line equivalent to "time" in Linux?

Question

I have a question that might be silly, but I can't find the answer anywhere on the Internet. On Linux-based systems, you enter “time” in the terminal before any command indicates how long the command will take in terms of real, user, and system time. For example, typing

time ls 

lists the files and folders in the current directory, and then gives the amount of real, user, and system time it takes to list the files and folders. Are there windows equivalent to this? I am trying to compare the performance of different algorithms, but I do not have a Linux operating system, so I was hoping that Windows had a similar command.

Answer 1

Below are far from perfect. But this is the closest that I could come up with to simulate the behavior of UNIX time . I am sure that it can be improved.

I basically create a cmdlet that gets a script block, generates a process, and uses GetProcessTimes to get Kernel, User, and Elapsed times.

After loading the cmdlet, just call it with

Measure-Time -Command {your-command} [-silent]

The -Silent switch means there is no output generated from the command (for example, you are only interested in temporary measures)

So for example:

 Measure-Time -Command {Get-Process;sleep -Seconds 5} -Silent 

The output:

 Kernel time : 0.6084039 User time : 0.6864044 Elapsed : 00:00:06.6144000 

Here is the cmdlet:

 Add-Type -TypeDefinition @" using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; public class ProcessTime { [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public static extern bool GetProcessTimes(IntPtr handle, out IntPtr creation, out IntPtr exit, out IntPtr kernel, out IntPtr user); } "@ function Measure-Time { [CmdletBinding()] param ([scriptblock] $Command, [switch] $Silent = $false ) begin { $creation = 0 $exit = 0 $kernel = 0 $user = 0 $psi = new-object diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo $psi.CreateNoWindow = $true $psi.RedirectStandardOutput = $true $psi.FileName = "powershell.exe" $psi.Arguments = "-command $Command" $psi.UseShellExecute = $false } process { $proc = [diagnostics.process]::start($psi) $buffer = $proc.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd() if (!$Silent) { Write-Output $buffer } $proc.WaitForExit() } end { $ret = [ProcessTime]::GetProcessTimes($proc.handle, [ref]$creation, [ref]$exit, [ref]$kernel, [ref]$user ) $kernelTime = [long]$kernel/10000000.0 $userTime = [long]$user/10000000.0 $elapsed = [datetime]::FromFileTime($exit) - [datetime]::FromFileTime($creation) Write-Output "Kernel time : $kernelTime" Write-Output "User time : $userTime" Write-Output "Elapsed : $elapsed" } } 

Answer 2

I found a similar question on SuperUser that covers some alternatives. First of all, this is my suggestion to use Measure-Command in PowerShell.

 Measure-Command {ls} 

In my comment, the syntax is wrong.