Timing the execution of a command-line script
I often find myself wanting to know how long something takes on the command line, here is one way of doing it:
START=$(date +%s)
# do somehing
echo "Completed in $(echo $(date +%s)-$START|bc) seconds"
In some cases the bc command is unavailable. For example, CoreOS does not ship with bc. The following is better suited to those situations:
START=$(date +%s)
# do something
SECONDS=`expr $(date +%s) - $START`
echo "Completed in $SECONDS seconds"