How to check how long a process ran after it finished?

Question

Currently I'm using the following to check how long a process is actually running:

ps -eo uid,pid,etime | egrep '^ *MY_ID' | egrep 'PID_OF_PROCESS'

And that outputs the following:

MY_ID PID_OF_PROCESS       00:16

However, after the process ends I want to find out how long it actually ran for but I can't seem to find that information.

Answer 1

I don't think it is possible to obtain such information after the process has already finished.

If you know beforehand that you will need that information, you can run the command as

time <command>

e.g.

~> time sleep 1

real        0m1.003s
user        0m0.002s
sys         0m0.001s

Answer 2

Check if your unix variant supports process accounting. For example, on Ubuntu (and most other Linux distributions), this is provided by the acct package . If the accounting subsystem is up and running, then lastcomm shows information about finished processes, including how much processor time they used (the wall clock time isn't recording).

If you need timing for a specific program, invoke it through time.

If you need more precise information, use a fancier auditing package, for example the audit subsystem under Linux.