time command

Lee Woodbury leland at cs.columbia.edu
Fri Apr 13 04:45:25 AEST 1990


In article <3556 at zorba.Tynan.COM> drich at klaatu.lanl.gov (David Rich) writes:
>I've not run across a reasonable description of
>the output of the time command in unix doc that
>I've seen.  What do these numbers mean? In general,
>what do they say about an application?
>
>e.g., 46.6u 1.8s 0:50 96% 0+1716k 5+0io 13pf+0w

The 'time' command is part of the shell (in your case, the csh; the
sh's and ksh's time has a different output format).  The csh(1)
man page provides explication of the above format, but to summarize,
the above example indicates:

tag	   # unit	description
-----	---- ---------- --------------------------------------------
%U	46.6 seconds	CPU time devoted to the user's process.
%S	 1.8 seconds	CPU time consumed by the kernel on behalf of
			of the user's process.
%E	  50 seconds	Elapsed (wallclock) time for the command.
%P	  96 percent	( %U + %S ) / %E expressed as a percentage.
%X	   0 Kb		Average amount of shared memory used.
%D	1716 Kb		Average amount of unshared data space used.
%I	   5 -		Number of block input operations.
%O	   0 -		Number of block ouput operations.
%F	  13 - 		Number of page faults.
%W	   0 - 		Number of swaps.

Leland Woodbury
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