/usr/bin/time -f "time: %E"is a command line command used to display the execution time of a command in a custom format on Linux systems. This command uses the GNU time tool instead of the shell's built-in time command.
Explain the meaning of each part:
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/usr/bin/time: This is the path to the GNU time tool. On most Linux systems, the executable file for the time tool is located at/usr/bin/time. -
-f "time: %E": This is an option of the time tool, which-frepresents the specified format and"time: %E"is a time format string. In this example,%Eis part of a formatted string that displays the actual time elapsed.%E: Indicates that the actual time consumed is displayed in the format of "[[hours:]minutes:]seconds".
So when you run /usr/bin/time -f "time: %E"a command, it will execute the following commands and display the execution time of the command in a custom format of "time: XX:XX:XX" where XX represents the hours, minutes and seconds of the actual time .
For example, if you run the following command:
/usr/bin/time -f "time: %E" sleep 5
It will output results similar to the following:
time: 0:00:05
This means that sleep 5the command took 5 seconds of actual time to run.