It doesn't look like you could, the man page does list a number of formatting options, but there's no provision for setting the accuracy. For example, %e, %S and %U seem to always give the output with two decimal places.

On the other hand, Bash's builtin time does support setting the number of digits after the decimal point, up to 3, so you might be able to use it to get what you wanted:

$ TIMEFORMAT='real: %3R user: %3U sys: %3S cpu: %P' bash -c 'time sleep 1.233' real: 1.234 user: 0.000 sys: 0.000 cpu: 0.00 

The getrusage() system call gives the times as struct timeval, so up to microseconds, so I suppose you could make your own implementation of time to get more accuracy. A whole another thing is how accurate the numbers actually are.

It doesn't look like you could, the man page does list a number of formatting options, but there's no provision for setting the accuracy. For example, %e, %S and %U seem to always give the output with two decimal places.

On the other hand, Bash's builtin time does support setting the number of digits after the decimal point, up to 3, so you might be able to use it to get what you wanted. The TIMEFORMAT environment variable controls the output format:

$ TIMEFORMAT='real: %3R user: %3U sys: %3S cpu: %P' bash -c 'time sleep 1.233' real: 1.234 user: 0.000 sys: 0.000 cpu: 0.00 

Or just without setting TIMEFORMAT, since the default output also shows three digits. It does separate minutes though:

$ bash -c 'time sleep 1.233' real 0m1.234s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.000s 

The getrusage() system call gives the times as struct timeval, so up to microseconds, so I suppose you could make your own implementation of time to get more accuracy. A whole another thing is how accurate the numbers actually are.