How to get the time of several commands with a loop

Question

I have this command:

time -p sh -c 'command1; command2;'

So command1and command2 is executed and I get the real, user and sys time printed on the console.

But I want that command1; command2; is looped 10 times and then I want to get the time which is used for the two commands.

score 25 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 24 '13 at 19:34

25

With zsh:

time (repeat 10 {cmd1; cmd2})

zsh's repeat is inherited from csh.

With tcsh:

time repeat 10 eval 'cmd1; cmd2'

Would give you the time for each iteration and the overall time at the end.

answered Mar 24 '13 at 19:34

score 20 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 24 '13 at 18:38

20

You can write a simple for-loop

 time -p bash -c "for (( i=0; i<10; i++ )); do command1; command2; done;"

Note that I used bash instead of sh for the loop.

answered Mar 24 '13 at 18:38

Bernhard

24

In bash you can just time (for i in {1..10}; do sleep 1 ; done) – frostschutz Mar 24 '13 at 18:47
2

@frostschutz: Yours seems like a much better answer. Please post it as an answer. – Chris Page Jan 24 '16 at 21:58
anyway to do this for multiline forloop? – Brian Wiley Dec 10 '20 at 15:14
@frostschutz's answer works for a multiline for loop too. Just time ( <multiline loop> ) – daviewales Feb 28 '23 at 04:53

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered May 29 '20 at 23:46

6

For simple for loops you can time the for loop directly:

time for i in {1..10}; do echo $i; sleep 1; done

answered May 29 '20 at 23:46

qwr

This doesn't print the time for me... – user5601 Jul 15 '22 at 00:36
user5601: using zsh? with zsh the for has to be in a subshell: time (for i in {1..10}; do echo $i; sleep 1; done) – JohnLittle May 08 '23 at 22:28

3 Answers3