Unix time how long a process takes

If the program is running in the background, you can send it the terminate signal using the kill command. Run the sleep command in the foreground. This will terminate the sleep command and return control to the shell. Now run the same command in the background. Then run jobs to verify that it is running and display the job id. Finally, instruct the program to exit using kill along with the job id for the process.

Note that the job id only exists in the context of the currently running shell. Once a program has been placed in the background, it is not necessary to remain logged in. The process will continue to run even after you log out. In fact, it is common practice to do this for long running jobs. However, once you've logged out, you can no longer refer to the process by its job id. You can, on the other hand, still access it using its process id, since this remains in effect during the entire time the process is running.

To find the process id for a given process, we can use our old friends ps and grep. Run sleep in the background again. Then use ps and grep to find its process id and use kill to terminate it. To confirm the process has been terminated, you can repeat the ps -ef grep sleep command above. One final note about processes: since UNIX is a multi-user system, your actions can have an impact on the other users of the system.

Like other multi-tasking systems, UNIX uses a scheduler to divide up time on the CPU and allocate the slices of time to the various processes running on the system. This answer needs improvement. And yes, I'm aware two years have gone by. Show 1 more comment. The Overflow Blog.

Podcast Explaining the semiconductor shortage, and how it might end. Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Like 7. Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Join For Free. Linux Commands to Find Process Runtimes As I said, there is no single command, which can tell us that from how long a process is running. Step 2: Find the Runtime or Start Time of a Process Once you have the PID, you can look into proc directory for that process and check the creation date, which is when the process was started.

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