How to measure time of program execution in bash

Sometimes you want to compare the execution time between two different implementations in your scripts, so to do this easily use the time built-in shell tool.

First you must know the path of your time shell tool.

$ which time
/usr/bin/time

If you use time directly could have some troubles.

$ time -f %e sleep 4
-f: command not found
real    0m0.071s
user    0m0.056s
sys     0m0.012s

Use the which time result to use it instead.

$ /usr/bin/time -f %e sleep 4
4.00

You'll get the result in seconds.

The structure must be like /usr/bin/time -f %e YOUR SCRIPT INSTRUCTIONS HERE