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.
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 Check if your unix variant supports process accounting. For example, on Ubuntu (and most other Linux distributions), this is provided by the acct package Install acct http://bit.ly/software-small. 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.
apt.ubuntu.com, and then the image got deleted from imgur. I must have used it hundreds of times across SE and I do not relish the prospect of editing them all. I'm still holding out for SE doing an automated replacement, which they won't do since they didn't even do it when all the Java documentation moved. Before I saw this questions and its answers, I made a little bash script. This is still useful, if you don't have root rights and acct isn't installed or you don't invoke your command directly (in my case: I use a gui to setup background processes). You need to get the PID before running (anyone interested in adding it into the script? :)
#!/bin/bash echo "Checking run time" read -p "What is the pid? " PID while true; do # sleep needed! used to reduce cpu usage and mass of output sleep 5 ps -eo uid,pid,etime | egrep '$PID' | egrep '$UID' done With this, find the PID of PROCESS_NAME
ps aux | awk 'NR == 1 || /PROCESS_NAME/'
Actually I tried combining USER-ID and PID to make the script non-ambigious, but it's not that easy... ps -eo uid,pid,etime | egrep '$UID[[:space:]]$PID' don't seem to work always...
egrep '$UID' as I am the only user like so: ps -eo uid,pid,etime | egrep $PID