How do I time a specific command?

Question

(The linux equivalent of TimeThis.exe)

Something like:

timethis wget foo.com
Receiving foo.com  
...

wget foo.com took 3 seconds.

Answer 1

Try just time instead of timethis.

Although be aware that there's often a shell builtin version of time and a binary version, which will give different results:

$ time wget -q -O /dev/null http://unix.stackexchange.com/

real    0m0.178s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m0.005s

vs

$ \time wget -q -O /dev/null http://unix.stackexchange.com/
0.00user 0.00system 0:00.17elapsed 4%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+613minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Answer 2

By using the executable time instead of the shell builtin, you can specify the output format and values. E.g. get the real elapsed time together with the command name and parameters

/usr/bin/time --format='%C took %e seconds' sleep 3
sleep 3 took 3.00 seconds