It is about Time ... a process

Sometimes, it is easy to overlook the simple Linux commands. Take the command time, for example.

It simply times how long a command takes to run, and gives you 3 statistics:

1. Elapsed real time (in seconds).
   
2. Total number of CPU-seconds that the command spent in user mode.
   
3. Total number of CPU-seconds that the command spent in kernel mode.
   

I use time a lot to benchmark network performance, e.g.,

$ time scp some-file  peter@192.168.22.104:/home/peter/some/location/
real    0m17.742s
user    0m0.364s
sys     0m0.476s

You can be creative with time, and run it like this:

$ time cat 

What does it do? It starts a timer, and stops when you enter Control D (to terminate the input stream to the cat command). It is a quick timer.